I have a client who sells snacks and drinks. For the drinks he only wants shipping to be available to the local free delivery zone (which I have set up w/ the MultiGeoZone / MultiTable shipping module). For anyone outside the local area he wants them to know that the drinks can't be shipped. The problem is that the cases of drinks are cost prohibitive to ship.
We actually sort of set this up on his old site by assigning a weight of 100 pounds to each of the drinks and adding a message on the product descriptions of those products, as well as on the home, shopping cart and checkout pages. If someone outside of the local area ignored all those messages and put the drinks into their cart they would get a very high shipping charge at checkout. We feel though that this would more likely make them dump the whole order than to be smart enough to go back and remove those items from the cart. I know, the problem is that OSC can't know that they are outside of the local zone until they try to check out.
If anyone knows of a more slick way to handle this please let me know. I'm looking at the Restrict Delivery shipping module which says:
Any order containing one or more "restricted" products will have only a subset of options available,
as defined by the configuration key RESTRICT_DELIVERY_SHIPPING_METHOD--a semicolon-delimited list of allowed
delivery methods.
What we ideally want is for any order containing one or more "restricted" products to kick back a message saying that the customer must remove those items from the cart in order to complete checkout. Maybe there's a way to fine-tune the Restrict Delivery module to give them this message instead of offering other shipping options. I don't know enough about the module to know the answer to that.
Any advice or ideas?
Thanks