Forcing certain shipping for a product

I am setting up a shop 1.5.6.4 at the moment and stumbled into a bit of a roadblock r.e. my shipping / Geo Zones.

I think I have sorted the zones part. My problem there is that I send to UK and Europe via Royal Mail. In the shipping module if I allowed EU Zone to use Royal Mail then Europe would be getting charged the UK rate and they could choose UK 2nd class etc even though they were in 'example' Germany.

My solution to that is I think that I will use Royal Mail for UK Zone and then mirror the European charges in the weight based and use that for EU zone. Is there a way I can get Opencart to only accept customers from UK and EU? or solely UK if the EU 'botch' I am using doesn't work?


My second and more important problem is that I have certain items like live fish fry and these must be sent on a guaranteed next day before service. I have seen some extensions that can force a cart to use a shipping method if the customer adds relevant items to their cart. They look a bit overcomplicated for what I want though.

I was thinking if I put my upper limits for shipping at a ludicrously high amount like 9999 and the highest price chargable for shipping would be say £9, then I could put a ludicrously high weight on the products that need next day then it would force that cart to use the £9 shipping. Does that sound feasible

Thanks in advance
Andy

Your solution of mirroring the rates in Weight Based Shipping is what I would have suggested doing, so I think it's a good solution. It should work fine to limit the shipping rates to those geo zones -- anywhere else will not display a shipping rate, so the customer would not be able to proceed through check out.

For individual items, I have a number of shipping extensions that can do product-based rates, but if you're willing to use a high rate like 9,999 then I don't think you need them. Just set the weight for those products to something very high like you suggest, and then force the appropriate amount.

It sounds like you're on the right track for both things, and to my knowledge it's really the only way to do it with built-in shipping methods. Hope it works out for you -- if not, feel free to contact me at www.getclearthinking.com/contact to discuss other shipping solutions.

Thanks for the reassurance Johnathan, I will set it up that way and hopefully will do what I want it to.