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mcamca wrote: Slovenia - Zones as follows (don't know whether they are correct!):

Pomurska [PM], Podravska [PD], Koroška [KR], Savinjska [SV], Zasavska [ZS], Spodnjeposavska [SO]
Osrednjeslovenska [OR], Gorenjska [GR], Goriška [GN], Obalno-kraška [OA]

Should be included in next SQL!

why would we add them if you don't know if they are correct.

Qphoria wrote:

mcamca wrote: Slovenia - Zones as follows (don't know whether they are correct!):

Pomurska [PM], Podravska [PD], Koroška [KR], Savinjska [SV], Zasavska [ZS], Spodnjeposavska [SO]
Osrednjeslovenska [OR], Gorenjska [GR], Goriška [GN], Obalno-kraška [OA],Jugovzhodna Slovenija[JG],Notranjsko-kraška {NT]

Should be included in next SQL!

why would we add them if you don't know if they are correct.

Would have thought that this was obvious:
Slovenia with no zones set looks stupid to the customer and reflects poorly on the store and Opencart!
Maybe I should have said "The correct zones for Slovenia should be included in the next SQL!" because thats what I meant!
Suggest you add them or find out the correct zones for Slovenia yourself and add these!

Some countries have no zones.. like singapore and gibraltar

Qphoria wrote:Some countries have no zones.. like singapore and gibraltar

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For Singapore I would enter 2 zones/regions which covers the whole of Singapore:
Zone 1: Singapore Island [Pulau Ujong]
Zone 2: Singapore [Offshore Islands]
or if you want a lot more work enter all of the districts! I hav'nt done this as the above 2 are adequate!

For Gibralter I would enter one Zone/Region as either:
British overseas territory
or just:
Gibraltar

Two appearances of Gibraltar in the address would be better than the customer seeing only:
---None---

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Okay, so I think I'm going to add 'Channel Islands' as a country and then 'Jersey' as zones... one question though, what do I need to enter as the 'Zone Code' for each of these new entries? Does what I enter matter, for credit card validation etc? or is it just for my own reference?

The biggest reason to make zones part of a drop-down is to reduce the chance of a customer misspelling his own address, and hence improve the chances of the customer's purchase actually reaching him. Another reason is that more and more payment and shipping extensions use the standardized zone descriptors in order to provide seamless integration with OpenCart.

I'm running OpenCart 1.5.1.3 with Royal Mail as my postage method and I've had an email today from someone saying they're trying to buy something from my shop but they can't because Guernsey is not listed on the website. I've found this thread and it appears to be the most relevant to my problem but I'm not sure exactly what came of it - were the Channel Islands added to the system in the end? They didn't appear to exist on mine so I've added them as countries and added them to the Europe zone so that they're VAT exempt. However, when I try to checkout with a Guernsey address it only lists "International Signed For" as a Royal Mail postage method, when in actual fact it should list standard Royal Mail postage methods. I appreciate that this is because Guernsey is listed as a country in Europe - i.e. outside the UK - but is there any way of setting up the Royal Mail extension so that it includes Guernsey, Jersey etc for UK postage methods?

The only alternative that I can see is creating a separate postage method that applies to the Channel Islands and copying the Royal Mail postage bands to that extension - is that the easiest way to do it or has anyone come up with a better solution?

Right, for what it's worth, here's what I've done to temporarily address the issue:

- Created new countries for each island; Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Herm and Sark
- Created a new Geo Zone called "Channel Islands"
- Added each of the islands/countries to the "Channel Islands" Geo Zone

This puts the Channel Islands into the system so that customers can at least register and enter addresses. But it left the issue of shipping methods unresolved, so I then:

- Enabled the "Weight Based Shipping" shipping extension for only the "Channel Islands" Geo Zone and copied the postage rates from Royal Mail First Class Recorded.

What this means is that customers can now register and checkout with addresses in Jersey, Guernsey etc and do not get charged tax because the Channel Islands are not within the UK, but they CAN select Royal Mail First Class Recorded as a shipping method due to the above shipping fix.

However, issues remain. When the user checks out, they do see Royal Mail First Class Recorded as an option for Channel Islands shipping (through the "Weight Based Shipping" extension modification), however they also see "International Signed For" (but not Airmail, for some reason?!) because the Royal Mail extension sees the Channel Islands countries as being outside the UK. More importantly, by modifying the "Weight Based Shipping" extension to cater for Channel Islands shipping, it is only possible to include one postage method per zone due to the restrictions of the extension - so customers in the Channel Islands can only select First Class Recorded and not the other Royal Mail UK shipping methods, e.g. First Class Standard, Special Delivery, etc.

I can see a solution but it's tricky. Keeping the newly created country/zone setup for the Channel Islands countries as detailed above, we would need to simply modify the royal_mail.php model file instead of editing the "Weight Based Shipping" extension. What we would need to do is:

1) Edit the "if" statement at the start of each UK postage method to say "if country=UK OR zone=Channel Islands", instead of just "if country=UK" - this would result in all UK Royal Mail shipping methods becoming available for customers in the Channel Islands (I think).

2) Edit the international methods to somehow filter out the Channel Islands zone / countries so that the international postage methods do not show when a customer from the Channel Islands checks out.

I'm pretty sure this would solve the problem - does anybody see any potential issues with it? More importantly, can anybody suggest better code for editing the royal_mail.php model file than my suggestion below? My suggestion is changing the "if" statements to include each of the Channel Islands countries, e.g:

if($address['iso_code_2']!='GB')

would change to

if(($address['iso_code_2']!='GB') && ($address['iso_code_2']!='GG') && ($address['iso_code_2']!='JE') && ($address['iso_code_2']!='AY') && ($address['iso_code_2']!='HM') && ($address['iso_code_2']!='SS'))

for international methods. Any better suggestions?

What happened with this!? I have a customer trying to order from the Isle of Man and he can't because it doesn't exist in the system, which is kind of ridiculous. Instead of arguing about it, have a look and see what Amazon and Ebay do and follow their lead. This needs resolving!

Anyone?

How about you just add it yourself? It takes a whole 2 secs
Admin->System->Localisation->Zone

How about you guys don't leave out critical functionality? It shouldn't be up to your users to hack this stuff together, it should just be included.

Fatbat wrote:How about you guys don't leave out critical functionality? It shouldn't be up to your users to hack this stuff together, it should just be included.

Have to say I agree - as much as I value OpenCart for what it is (I run it on three shops) and appreciate the difficulty in deciding how to classify places like Jersey and Guernsey, in terms of countries, regions, zones etc (especially for people who aren't from the UK), I simply cannot see any reason for (or justification in) leaving them out completely. I've had the same situation as Fatbat when somebody contacted me to say that they were unable to purchase products from me because their country did not exist on the system. I have no way of knowing how many other people have tried but failed to purchase from me for the same reason but simply went elsewhere instead of contacting me. I dare say there are a lot of people out there running shops on OpenCart who are potentially losing sales because of this issue.

For what it's worth, I added a supplementary zone to run alongside the UK, and set it as tax-free. Then I added Jersey, Guernsey etc as countries and put them in the new zone. Then you just have to incorporate that zone into your shipping methods, although that may or may not be straight-forward, depending on which shipping methods you use.

In case it's of any use to anyone, these are the postal regions for Gibraltar ready to paste into PHPMyAdmin (assuming you still have Gibraltar with its default ID of 83):