Loading the shipping extension early

Hi!,

I have been using opencart for a long time and I have to say that it is great! I have recently had a request to show the shipping cost and tax on the cart page, which I know is there if the customer has gone through the checkout process past the shipping page, where they would have selected the shipping method desired. The client, however, only supports a single shipping method, UPS Ground, and wants the shipping cost and tax to always show on the cart page, even if the customer has not selected the shipping explicitly on checkout/shipping. Basically they want all totals to show as if the customer had already gone through the process of selecting shipping. Is there a way to do this? I assume this would involve calling the UPS shipping extension earlier than opencart is currently designed to do, which it would normally do when the customer selects UPS Ground on the checkout/shipping page. Thank you so much to anyone with any ideas! I am using opencart v1.4.9.1

The problem is that unless they are logged in there is no way for the cart to know what their zip code/ shipping address is. Even then until they pick a shipping address you can only guess at which address that is associated with the account they are going to want to ship to.

There is a commercial solution that asks for the zip code and displays shipping costs, but without getting the shipping destination from the customer you will never be able to show the shipping quotes.

That being said if you are using flat rate or weight based shipping you might be able to force it to show somehow as you don't really have to have the zip to calculate shipping in those situations.

Xsecrets wrote:The problem is that unless they are logged in there is no way for the cart to know what their zip code/ shipping address is. Even then until they pick a shipping address you can only guess at which address that is associated with the account they are going to want to ship to.

There is a commercial solution that asks for the zip code and displays shipping costs, but without getting the shipping destination from the customer you will never be able to show the shipping quotes.

That being said if you are using flat rate or weight based shipping you might be able to force it to show somehow as you don't really have to have the zip to calculate shipping in those situations.

That's a good point, Xsecrets. I had definitely considered that they would have to be logged in to retrieve the shipping address, but I hadn't considered the fact that there could be multiple shipping addresses associated with any given account. I'm not using flat shipping rates, so this could indeed be a big problem and a big headache with calculating shipping for various zones, etc. Thanks a lot for your input!