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XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

 
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  #1  
Old 05-25-2014, 11:17 PM
 
adriant adriant is offline
 

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Default XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

Just setting up a micro site for some of our product lines and have come across a serious problem............. or maybe I just don't get it.

Having set-up and used the brilliant shipping system on XC4 I'm pretty sure on the methodology on how it works, however on XC5 there seems to be a problem or two.

Need to setup a 'congestion zone' surcharge' - as successfully done on XC4 on our main site.

Setup the Delivery Shipping with 1 basic Delivery area with no extra charges and inserted the 'Congestion Zone' area with a ё6 flat rate surcharge.

Set-up the UK zone for general free shipping and works OK
All Counties except LONDON and only put 1 post code in it to test - used ME%

Set up the 'CONGESTION ZONE' zone - added a VAT zone to calc VAT amount as I've discovered that you have yo have VAT zone for every UK delivery ZONE.

In the Congestion zone' I've just used 'London' as the county and one postcode - E1% as the area for surcharging.

Problems found:

At the checkout if you select London as the county and ME14 (as an example) it adds the surcharge and still allows you to check out with an incorrect postcode.

At the Checkout if you select Kent as the county and E1 as the postcode it doesn't add the surcharge it still allows you to checkout with with incorrect county

At the Checkout London + E1 adds the charge and allows checkout.

At the checkout Kent + ME1 no extra charge and allows checkout.


A solution need to be found to tell the customer that they entered either the county or postcode incorrectly, it should be corrected to allow proper calculation of shipping costs.

In addition this supposes that the customer has put in the PostCode as capitals because we now get on to the next major problem I can't seem to get around...

At the checkout if the customer puts in e1 instead of E1 - with any county let alone London - the shipping cost is now 0.00 and the VAT is not calculated and is removed.

In the 'Zone Masks' on XC4 it doesn't matter if it is set as upper or lower it calculates correctly.

In XC5 the upper/lower case needs to be rectified.

Next......

If you put in the mask

E1%
e1%

you might have thought this would be temporary workaround... not so...... no calculation of carriage costs takes place.

further if you have

E1%

with a carriage return . so that the cursor is on the line below it, that screws it up as well.

So if I am doing something, or not doing something I would really like to know........ if this is not the case then until these basic shipping problems are rectified the package is useless.... maybe only to me..........

All the best
Adrian

PS. our main site where all is well is www.serpro.eu
the site where we can't seem to get it to work is www.drip-tray.co.uk
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  #2  
Old 05-26-2014, 12:43 PM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

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Default Re: XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

Hi adriant!

First of all, I am really thankful for such a detailed feedback.

I have been testing the cases you described and I came to the point when I need to ask you about accessing your admin area in order to check out your destination zones/shipping settings. Could you please let me know whether you can provide me with them?

If so, please pm me with them. I will check your settings and if there is a bug, we will be able to fix it in future versions.

Thank you.

Tony.
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  #3  
Old 05-27-2014, 12:08 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

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Default Re: XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

First of all, thank you @adriant for allowing me to check the problems directly on your web-site.

Here is what I found:

Quote:
Originally Posted by adriant
Problems found:

At the checkout if you select London as the county and ME14 (as an example) it adds the surcharge and still allows you to check out with an incorrect postcode.

This is a bug. In this case, you should not get a surcharge (since this address is in the Default zone - all addresses), but you will be able to check out, because this address is in the Default zone.

Quote:
At the Checkout if you select Kent as the county and E1 as the postcode it doesn't add the surcharge it still allows you to checkout with with incorrect county

This is a correct behaviour. The same as above, this address belongs to Default zone (all addresses) and since you have shipping rate for Default zone, it is used at checkout.

Quote:
At the Checkout London + E1 adds the charge and allows checkout.

At the checkout Kent + ME1 no extra charge and allows checkout.

These cases are also correct.

Quote:
A solution need to be found to tell the customer that they entered either the county or postcode incorrectly, it should be corrected to allow proper calculation of shipping costs.

This problem is usually solved in the following way:
1) You should remove the shipping rates for Default zone and define two rates: one for London zone, one for UK. If you did this, then two first cases (county London + ME14 postcode, county Kent + postcode E1) would return "No shipping methods available" error message.
2) You can alter this error message to something like "No shipping methods available. Please check your shipping address" and it would tell customers to make sure that their address is correctly specified.

As I remember, X-Cart 4 works the same way.

If you have an alternative solution to this problem, please let me know.

Quote:
In addition this supposes that the customer has put in the PostCode as capitals because we now get on to the next major problem I can't seem to get around...

At the checkout if the customer puts in e1 instead of E1 - with any county let alone London - the shipping cost is now 0.00 and the VAT is not calculated and is removed.

In the 'Zone Masks' on XC4 it doesn't matter if it is set as upper or lower it calculates correctly.

This is a bug and it will be solved.

Quote:
If you put in the mask

E1%
e1%

you might have thought this would be temporary workaround... not so...... no calculation of carriage costs takes place.

further if you have

E1%

with a carriage return . so that the cursor is on the line below it, that screws it up as well.

This is a bug as well. I have reported it to the team and it will be fixed.

Quick review
- we are going to fix three bugs mentioned here: shipping rate is sometimes calculated incorrectly (London + ME14 postcode), postcode mask does not work properly with upper/lowercase symbols, postcode mask field does not support several values.
- if you feel that there is a better way of checking the address, please let me know how you see it.

Thank you.

Tony.
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  #4  
Old 05-27-2014, 09:23 PM
 
adriant adriant is offline
 

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Default Re: XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

Hi Tony

Many thanks for you time on this. I am sure that it will assist a lot of people.

I think that what I overlooked when selecting options on the 'RATES' screen was that the ZONE>>RATE boxes must be specific. I thought setting a rate for all address would mean all address in the LONDON zone.........but no.

In My case when setting the Rates for 'LONDON' - the edit charges box must have selected LONDON and also the box to the right must have LONDON - I assume this is the ZONE box selector (not sure). Anyway if you have the right hand box set as 'All Address Zones' or 'Default Zone', for example, it puts a different address zone profile into that shipping charge. And the whole thing gets confused..... as did I.....

Doing it this way does return the correct charges and customer 'feed back' to correct their typo error.

Have also just checked to see if it works without having a 'COUNTY' set in the ZONE MASK - and it does. It will work based just on the postcode. This is essential as you would be surprised as to how many people either have no idea which county they live in or many people will still want to use an older county name that doesn't actually exist any more. You also have the Unitary Authorities, which aren't actually in your counties list as yet. So, in our XC4 main site, we have put in a -- PLEASE SELECT -- county in each of our shipping zone masks, as most people do seem to know their postcode.

So when the bug is ironed out regarding postcode 'case' masking we will be able to use it, but not until then I'm afraid.

It would be really good if you could force upper-case letters in the postcodes, this would really assist couriers and warehouse staff and reduce mistakes.

Regards
Adrian
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  #5  
Old 05-28-2014, 04:57 AM
  tony_sologubov's Avatar 
tony_sologubov tony_sologubov is offline
 

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Default Re: XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

Quote:
Originally Posted by adriant
I think that what I overlooked when selecting options on the 'RATES' screen was that the ZONE>>RATE boxes must be specific. I thought setting a rate for all address would mean all address in the LONDON zone.........but no.

In My case when setting the Rates for 'LONDON' - the edit charges box must have selected LONDON and also the box to the right must have LONDON - I assume this is the ZONE box selector (not sure). Anyway if you have the right hand box set as 'All Address Zones' or 'Default Zone', for example, it puts a different address zone profile into that shipping charge. And the whole thing gets confused..... as did I.....

Doing it this way does return the correct charges and customer 'feed back' to correct their typo error.

I see. Thank you Adrian for the detailed explanation! I will let our designer now about such problems with interface, so we will see what we can do about it.

Quote:
Have also just checked to see if it works without having a 'COUNTY' set in the ZONE MASK - and it does. It will work based just on the postcode. This is essential as you would be surprised as to how many people either have no idea which county they live in or many people will still want to use an older county name that doesn't actually exist any more. You also have the Unitary Authorities, which aren't actually in your counties list as yet. So, in our XC4 main site, we have put in a -- PLEASE SELECT -- county in each of our shipping zone masks, as most people do seem to know their postcode.

So when the bug is ironed out regarding postcode 'case' masking we will be able to use it, but not until then I'm afraid.

Just to let you know, you can add such 'fake' county in the Store Setup > Countries, states and zones > United Kingdom > Add state for United Kingdom section in admin area.

Quote:
It would be really good if you could force upper-case letters in the postcodes, this would really assist couriers and warehouse staff and reduce mistakes.

I believe, the fixes will be included into 5.1.3 or into 5.1.4.
5.1.3 will come out in couple of weeks.
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  #6  
Old 06-13-2014, 12:28 AM
 
adriant adriant is offline
 

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Default Re: XC5 Major League Problems with shipping zones

Many thanks Tony for solving this bug in 5.1.3. All working as they should.
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