I am trying to come up with my own schematic of Zones for my South African lighting business but I need to understand what the majority of you do with your customers when needing to ship and charge them for it. South Africa has nine Provinces:-
- Eastern Cape
- Free State
- Gauteng
- KwaZulu-Natal
- Limpopo
- Mpumalanga
- North West
- Northern Cape
- Western Cape
The business operates within the Western Cape, specifically within a suburb named Brackenfell which is in the City of Cape Town, however, if I list every suburb within every Province I'm going to have thousands of zones which I really don't want to setup and don't want my customer to have to search for their suburb like that to buy a light fitting. I could summarise the Western Cape for example into areas such as:-
- Bellville
- Cape Town
- Constantia
- George
- Hopefield
- Oudtshoorn
- Paarl
- Simon's Town
- Stellenbosch
- Swellendam
- Worcester
But this doesn't really cover all the areas... I'm trying to figure out how best to setup the shipping rules because if I have a customer that doesn't associate themselves with that area they might not sign up with that as their Region / State or pick it from the list when adding the Shipping Estimate onto the quote - I hope this makes sense.
If I go the route of creating the above mentioned Provinces as Zones I cannot setup accurate costing as someone in Bellville is 15 km from the business whereas someone in Worcester is 150 km which shipping costs would be higher or Hermanus for instance which is a smaller area but isn't on the list either.
I'll stop writing here to allow initial feedback - your responses are welcomed.
