Overseas Delivery Calculation
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30 June 2009 18:43pm
Hi,
We have a challenge, to which I don't think there is an answer but would welcome people’s thoughts.
We have a client (we are ecommerce web developers) who sells to the UK and overseas. UK delivery is simple, but overseas delivery is causing a lot of problems. They want to be able to give the user a price for the delivery at the time of order, but have no way of calculating it. They normally pick the order, package it and then work out the best courier option based on location (often Japan), weight and size of the package. They don't store either the weight of size of the products so we cannot do any calculation online based on that.
So does anyone have any ideas on how we can get to a delivery price? I thought not!
Moving on, currently, at the time of order they take and store (yes, store!) the credit card details but don't process them until they have contacted the client and advised of the final price with delivery. We don't want to store credit card details at all. With think the options are:
1. Rather than take an order, let the customer submit a quotation request. This is then returned via email with a final price and the customer can activate a link to enter their payment details and confirm the order.
2. Take a pre-authorisation on the credit card for a larger amount and then simply advising the customer of the delivery price.
3. Take credit card payment for the products, then once delivery price is known seek approval and then use a Continuous authority repeat transaction to add the delivery price.
If anyone has any better ideas, or even different ideas it would be great to hear about them.
Thanks.
Head of E-commerce at Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton
03 July 2009 20:15pm
It's worth taking a look at DHL - they have a basket plugin that enables accurate delivery pricing (including a margin if desired). But you will need volumetric sizes etc for all products.
Hope this helps
James
Ecommerce Manager Europe at Wolverine Worldwide
07 July 2009 08:49am
1/ Without weights / sizes you are on a hiding to nothing, really most people would work on an average cost based on sales history by country, some they will win on some they will loose a little profit, but, that loss on a few will probably be considerably less than the amount they are loosing in sales & time wasted.
2/ Take the payment as defeered, this means the amount is 'reserved' on the card (like a deposit on a hire car) and then when the shipment is ready you 'release' or draw down that payment.
But you are right to be concerned over storing card details.
HTH
Strategy Director at Blueleaf
08 July 2009 14:23pm
Storing credit card details means that you run into a lot of PCI compliance issues if you're going down the right path, and, depending on the company, this can be a reasonable concern and time investment. I do run across companies still that store credit card details in paper form under little to no security though - and it worries me how many others may do it! Your solutions all seem pretty viable, as is Jez's suggestion.
Personally however I would not enter my credit card details without being told a final price - there's too much uncertainty there and I would want confirmation first.
As for shipping, they need to bite the bullet and enter a weight / size to enable quick shipping calculations, otherwise they are going to drop countless sales off the back of poor usability and uncertainty - there's no excuse with the avialability of delivery APIs!