Exempt select products from shipping cost

I am currently in the process of setting a new opencart site with version 1.5.5.1 and need to have select products exempt from shipping cost. I have spent a lot of time searching through shipping extensions and can not seem to find anything to fit. This can't be that uncommon...HELP!

How do you charge shipping for your other products? If you want to just skip the shipping address and method steps, set the "Requires Shipping" setting to "No" on the select products.

If you need to still collect those, and are using for example a system that charges based on weight, then just set the weight of those products to 0. If you have other ways of charging for products, then Product-Based Shipping may work for you, to set a 0.00 cost for some products and charge formula rates for others.

Thanks for the response Johnathon...

Right now all other products will have total based shipping. I have a free extension for that and seems to work okay.
I've looked at some of the product-based shipping extensions and it seems like the problem would come in if someone ordered a mix of regular products and some of the ones that have free shipping (exempt). If I am not mistaken, the shipping method chosen ends up applying to the whole cart.

So if I had a way of maybe having a check box for each product that would exempt it from being used to calculate the shipping costs if they were included in the cart. Or maybe even using one of the other fields like 'location' where if it had a value in it, it would not use it in the calculation. Then would not have to really change the database???

Any ideas??? Thanks

I saw a couple of older threads on this same topic dated a couple of years ago, but never really offered a solution to the problem.

Product-Based Shipping can certainly give different costs to different products, and then combine them for a single shipping charge (or only show a rate when certain products are NOT in the cart). For example, an easy way to set it up would be similar to this:

RATE #1
Title: Free Shipping
Sort Order: 1
Products: ONLY ANY, (free shipping products)
Rate Type: Item-Based
Cost Brackets:
- From: 0, T0: 999999, Charge: 0

RATE #2
Title: Shipping
Sort Order: 2
Products: NOT, (free shipping products)
Rate Type: Total-Based
Cost Brackets: (as needed)

So your shipping charges would only apply for non-free shipping products in the cart. If free shipping products were the only ones in there, "Free Shipping" would show. Feel free to contact me at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you'd like to discuss it further.

Sounds like the Product-Based Shipping would work then. That's Great. I'll give it a try and email If Have any problems?
Thanks...