ParcelForce prices different per zone

Hi,

Can someone explain please how to get the ParcelForce extension to work with different zonal prices.

ZONAL SURCHARGES

Zone 1 – England, Wales and parts of Scotland excluding Highlands & Islands
UK48/24 agreed flat rate price

Zone 2 – Highlands & Islands of Scotland
UK48 & UK24 = flat rate price + 100%

Zone 3 – Northern Ireland
UK24= flat rate + 150%
UK48 = flat rate + 60% with a minimum charge of £6.50

Zone 3 – Isle of Man, Isle of Scilly
UK24/UK48 = Flat rate + 150%

Our UK parcel delivery zones
Zone 1
England, Wales and parts of Scotland, excluding Highlands and Islands. The zone is made up of all postcodes not mentioned in zones 2 and 3.
Zone 2
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland - postcodes IV, HS, KA27-28, KW, PA20-49, PA60-78, PH17-26, PH30-44, PH49-50, ZE.
Zone 3
Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Isles of Scilly -postcodes BT, IM, TR21-25.

Any suggestions ?

Thanks
Marky

Hi,
I'm facing the same problem on my first install of OC. Did you solve it?
Thanks

No, unfortunately no one had any suggestions

Hi,

Did either of you ever get an answer to this, specifically the different regions in the UK by postcode? I have the exact same issue just now.

Thanks,
Martin

Q has a module that I am using to do this successfully. Its called zoneplus I think. Very good. There is a new version which I haven't got around to upgrading to yet. I don't use Parcelforce, but the same problem applies to any UK courier.

Yeah I've ended up buying Zone Plus, however I'm a little unsure how to use it the way I want. Basically I just need to add a set surcharge for anyone in the 'Highlands and Islands' zone (3 full counties plus 3 part counties by postcode), a second surcharge for anyone in Northern Ireland, and a third surcharge for anyone in ROI.

Do I still use the Parcelforce module and if so can I add the extra on for the remote regions using Zone Plus? Or do I just stop using the Parcelforce module and use Zone Plus instead?

Thanks,
Martin

I just use Zone Plus.
I have geo zones set up for each area. And these are configured with the relevant postcodes.
e.g. Isle of Man ~IM (I know its a slightly different setup in the new version)
Then in Zone Plus I have a weight based rule for the Isle of Man Geo-Zone. This has the relevant charges.
I do this for each geo-zone. I can slot the various GeoZone's into my courier zone's.
I found some zone's had too many postcodes so I had to split, e.g Highlands and Islands and Highlands and Islands. (notice the dot).
I'm looking at moving over to Parcel Force from my current courier. The zone's are a lot simpler so if I get around to making the switch I'll let you know how I set it up.
Thanks
Rob

Thanks for the quick reply.

I think I'm nearly but it's doing some things I don't understand. I've turned off Parcelforce so I just have Zone Plus and Royal Mail switched on.

Under a certain weight, Royal Mail is cheaper, but once it gets past that it needs to go with a courier. So what I need is 4 sets of courier prices.

- Standard delivery zone
- Remote areas (Postcodes IV, KW, ZE, PH19-44, PA 20-99, and KA 27-28) = standard prices + £6
- Northern Ireland = standard prices +£10
- Republic of Ireland = standard prices +£20.

So I've created 3 geozones for Remote, NI and ROI, and adjusted the prices accordingly. NI and ROI work perfectly, adding the required surcharge but remote isn't completely working.

What I've done for that geozone is include the UK counties of Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Highlands, Perth and Kinross and Renfrewshire. In Zone Plus I've tried to use the address filtering to only apply the surcharge to certain postcodes. Firstly I tried excluding the postcodes not in the ranges above (PH1,PH2,PH3 ... etc).

Choosing Orkney, Shetland or Highlands gave the £6 surcharge option. However, if I choose Perth and Kinross, Renfrewshire or the Western Isles it didn't give me the surcharge option, no matter whether I entered a postcode in the range that was due it or not.

So then I changed to using the address filter to include the above postcodes and it seems to work ok. Although I'm confused as to why the exclude option didn't give the same result?

Just one other small thing, is it possible to change it slightly so in the checkout, instead of the delivery option being titled 'Zone Shipping', it was something else, for example 'Parcelforce'?

Thanks,
Martin

Oh, and lastly, I've just enabled the UK All Zones Geozone, but that's available even if the user chooses a remote location from one of the other geozones. Do I have to change the UK All Zones one so it doesn't include the areas above? And if so, is there a quicker way than adding each county one by one?

Thanks,
Martin

Ok, another update. I've created a geozone for the standard delivery areas of the UK and included all of the counties, except Orkney, Shetland, Highlands and Western Isles(which was a fun job...!). I did however include Perth and Kinross and Renfrewshire as some of those areas don't incur the surcharge.

I thought I could use the address filtering on postcode again but I've tried both excluding the relevant postcodes from the UK Standard Shipping geozone, as well as including the other set of postcodes, but neither works. Both times, when entering a standard area postcode, I get the standard shipping, but if I enter a remote postcode, I get both the remote shipping and standard shipping.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong so I'm hoping someone can point it out as I'm tantalisingly close to getting this to work!!

Thanks,
Martin

Just off the top of my head I think that you need to enter all the standard zone postcodes to your standard zone, other wise it counts as a match. Pretty sure that is what I had to do.
Its actually simpler than you might think as lots of things match. For example M for Manchester and MK for Milton Keynes both match if you just put M and that doesn't occur anywhere else. So you can summarise all the M** postcodes with just M.
I did a spreadsheet, of course I can't find it now.

I need to redo mine as I did make a few mistakes and I could simplify my zones further. I think it took me an evening to do it the first time. I did get quite cross at times...

Here is a screen shot of my zone 1 postcodes -ignore the IOw and the NI ones I left them on the screenshot by mistake (the will almost certainly be different to yours)..
and the codes in text are
~AL,B,BA,BB,BD,BH,BL,BN,BR,BS,C,D,E,FK,FY,G,HA,HD,HG,HP,HR,HU,HX,IG,IP,KA,KT,KY,L,M,N,O,PA,PE,PH,PL,PO,PR,R,S,T,UB,W,YO

~AB10,AB11,AB12,AB13,AB14,AB15,AB16,AB17,AB18,AB19,AB20,AB21,AB22,AB23,AB24,AB25,AB26,AB27,AB28,AB29,AB30,AB31,AB32,AB33,AB34,AB35,AB36,AB39

Success! And to be honest, I was there last night, I just forgot to enable to advanced filtering for the standard zone in zone plus...

So I've setup the standard zone as described above, and now I've added the remote postcodes to the exclude section and it seems to work perfect!

Thanks for your help and I'm going to try and find some time shortly to right a quick guide on how that's done because there must be a lot of people in the UK with the same/similar issues.

One more question I still have though is can I modify Zone Plus so that when an option from it is given to the visitor, it reads something other than 'Zone Shipping' above the options, for example 'Parcelforce' or 'Courier'.

Try the language file...
catalog/language/english/shipping/zoneplus.php
Well done by the way.

That's the one! Thanks very much for the help - it's such a relief when someone is able to help you out so quickly.

Hi Tinohead
I'm just in the process of moving over to ParcelForce. Today I brought ZonePlus up to date and installed the latest version. I'm still using my old courier and my old zones, but I set up all the new ones as well today. I wondered if you wanted to compare notes?

I split Zone 1 into 4 (to make the lists easier to manage, I think I broke my mouse wheel today...)
Zone 1 England (All the English regions added including cornwall which was originally missing for some reason)
Zone 1 Isle of Wight (I have a flat rate surcharge on the IOW)
Zone 1 Wales (All the welsh regions)
Zone 1 Scotland which looks like this... My Zone 2 Scotland My Zone 3, I decided, for the time being, not to separate out NI, to keep things simple I just have the same rate of each region in this zone. How does that compare to your setup? I have spent sometime thinking about Scotland, but my partner (she is Scottish) told me it was like I have it now and I'm not one to disagree! I'll post my postcode rules when I get a bit more time.

Thanks
Rob

I created a UK postcode based shipping module if anyone is interested - you don't need to use GeoZones - it's grouped into areas covered by UK Mail, if i remember correctly. If there is any interest I'll modify it to work with Parcel Force and publish it as an extension.