Shipping involves everything related to the actual physical delivery of products to e-commerce customers. Just as for payments, you can set up shipping methods, gateways and providers. In the following the terminology is described as well as the different configuration possibilities for shipping.
A shipping method manages a set of information and rules that determines the shipping cost and displays it on the front-end site while a customer checks out an item from his/her shopping basket. The shipping fee is added to the total price of the purchase. A shipping method is mapped to a shipping provider visible to a back-end administrator in Commerce Manager. This allows the public site to display friendly names such as "Ground Shipping" to the customer and this is mapped to a provider such as UPS. Therefore, when a customer picks "Ground Shipping," he/she will be using UPS.
A shipping provider is the class(es) that interacts directly with one or more actual shipping services such as USPS, UPS, or FedEX. It retrieves shipping price information from the shipping service(s) its associated with. One typical scenario would be to have a provider that represents a particular service (e.g. USPS). A provider can also represent a particular type of shipping situation. One example is that you could have a provider for overnight delivery. The provider could retrieve pricing for that service to determine the lowest price given the location of the customer. A provider could also represent other specific scenarios with one or more services such as price by weight or ground shipping.
Under Shipping Providers, a shipping gateway is the specific class that you select (Generic Gateway or Weight/Jurisdiction Gateway).
There are two options out of the box for shipping gateways: 1) Generic Gateway (flat shipping rate) and 2) Weight/Jurisdiction Gateway (base price + additional fee depending on weight and shipping location). You select the shipping gateway in the Shipping Provider screen and then configure the actual values for that gateway/provider in the Shipping Methods area.
An option which allows you to define values for region-specific shipping rates; this is only used when you select the Weight/Jurisdiction Gateway (i.e. California)
Group of jurisdictions; this is required because this is a required field when configuring the Shipping Method parameters (i.e. Southwest region).
Version: EPiServer Commerce 1 R2 SP2| Last updated: 2012-09-20 | Copyright © EPiServer AB | Send feedback to us