Free Shipping

Hi there!

We suffer from not being able to display free shipping in search engines that uses our google feed generated by GoogleBaseXML.

I do not understand how to configure GoogleBaseXML in order to include the free shipping options. I can't do overrides for all products.

We use Advanced Shipping by Rules to do shipping prices, where we do have a free shipping by a fixed order price amount (say 150$).

In short, I need to include free shipping on certain products in my feed. I need to do it via GoogleBaseXML and I do not use the default shipping by weight plugin. I can specify free shipping when order or product price is above 150$.

What would you advise ?
Cheers,
prokops

Hello, the feed is able to use the standard virtuemart shipping by weight plugin, but is not compatible with 3rd party plugins. It is just not practical to try to make it compatible with all 3rd party plugins, of which there are many, we would be doing nothing else if we tried to do that.

You have two choices:

1. You can use the Google merchant centre to set up your shipping charges, and not include them in the feed. Really that is your best option, I think that there are very few cases where it is actually necessary to include them in the feed.

2. We can look at making your feed compatible with the plugin that you mention, which I think is this one: http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/advanced-shipping-by-rules-for-virtuemart . It would need to be done as a custom programming job, if you are interested let me know and I will supply you with a quote for the work.

I strongly recommend that you look at option 1 first.

Hi Boggler and thanks for the answer.

My problem is that the service on which we are competing (kelkoo.dk) is using our feed directly from GoogleBaseXML. The google merchant feed is updated with shipping prices and should compete correctly on free shipping on google services, but not kelkoo.dk and it's subsidiaries.

Maybe it would it be possible to configure Shipping by Weight to accept free shipping for orders/products above 150$ and then have both shipping plugins to run together ?

We would love a quote to program support for Advanced Shipping by Rules by open-tools.net/
OR
program GoogleBaseXML to include free shipping as delivery-cost by defining a treshold for value, in our example: include shipping cost = 0 as a product parameter for each product with value higher than 150$.

Hello, if you would like to send me a copy of the shipping plugin then I can take a look at what would be involved in supporting it. As it is a commercial plugin I would not use it for any other purpose. You can email it to me at customers at spiral scripts.

Actually I think that including a free shipping option for products over a specified value directly in the feed options is a good suggestion, it would be quite simple to include, and might be the best solution. We could do this for a minimal charge, I will email you the details.