How to calculate shipping

[stephan]

Hi,

I am writing my own shopping cart script (PHP and MySQL). However I am struggling to figure out how to calculate the packaging and postage cost.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[temi]

Its one of the most complicated part of shopping cart as various businesses handles shipping differently. Are you developing the application for a particular trade or industry?
I had a similar issue when doing shipping section of my golf equipment site.

Are you witting it from scratch or modifying an existing application?

[liza.pinto1980]

packaging and shipping cost are depends on weight of product,country u delivered, packaging company u chose.

[craftyclicks]

You are a brave man to take on this kind of a project from scratch! There are a number of ready made shopping carts freely available - probably best to use one of these as a baseline.

As far a shipping goes, IMHO a good generic shopping cart should be configurable and offer a number of options to the merchant:

1. Fixed price shipping (easy) by delivery time (24hr, 48hr etc)
2. Different shipping price bands depending on destination country/province.
3. Shipping price based on weight and/or size (will need an extra weight and size attributes for each produck/SKU)

Then you can have a combination of these.... as temi mentioned, this can get very complex very quickly!

If you are writing from scratch I would suggest making the shipping calculator a plug-in with a well defined API. This way you will be able to offer a number of different shipping calculators to suit your users tastes. Also it will open the door for 3rd party developers to customise your shopping cart script easily.

Adam.