Ship in Cart Reloaded

Been working quite a bit recently on a site that I performed a “makeover” some months ago. The site owner has been steadily adding in extra things to make the site much more responsive to himself (the shop owner) and the customer – it really is turning out to be a very nice osCommerce shop.

One of the most recent tasks I was asked to work on was the implementation of “ship in cart”, which shows a customer as estimate of how much shipping would be, prior to starting the checkout process. It’s well known in osCommerce circles that the lack of display of shipping costs is a major cause of abandoned carts!

There are already 3 or 4 “ship in cart” contributions, but none of them work exactly right, and most of them are ugly! So, the task was to come up with something that works more slickly and looks better.

Firstly, found what consider the better “ship in cart” contribution; http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,7329 – however it seemed that the whole system only worked for Australian postcodes.

Some recoding time later and the system now works with multiple countries, based on postcode (eg for fedex, usps and so on).

The output looks like this;

And after searching the country/postcode, looks like this;

Obviously, if the shop had other shipping options (than Fedex) these would show.

I then sent the files on to my client, who changed them by removing the country (he ships only within the USA), and by adding a “throbber” image while the fedex quotes are returned to the page.

The whole system is powered by jQuery and as such does not need a page refresh to display the shipping quotes. I recoded the javascript in the existing contribution from around 20 lines of javascript to just 1 line. I’m very pleased with how this project turned out, and how the shop for which I made it is being built by it’s owner.