i have been searching these boards for months, looking for answers.
writing to threads in hopes that someone would come to my aid....but to no avail.
my problem was that our client needed for all the products made by one manufacturer to have shipping be free, but everything else needed to ship using the table rate.
someone suggested using the Multi-Vendor Shipping Contribution, since it can be used with other modules. I installed the contribution, but i just COULD NOT get it to work with the table rate....until today.
here was what i discovered....
for the Multi-Vendor Contribution to work, first of all, your products must have a Product Weight entered. even if it is 0.01. Without that, the shipping will just be returned as $0.00.
i then added a new method called Table. The instructions for this come with the Multi-Vendor Contribution, and are very straight forward.
Of note here is that you need to make sure that you set your Maximum Box Weight, in your SQL table "shipping_methods" to a positive amount, and make sure it is set pretty high (if you aren't actually interested in using the handling charges features of the contribution, which i was not). If you leave it set at 0, you may get a divide by zero error.
the instructions for the contribution also mention that you need to comment out a line found in the extra shipping modules that you plan to use (found in "catalog/includes/modules/shipping/name_of_file_here.php"). here is the snippet:
depending on which version of OSC you are using, you may or may not have that line exactly. the one i commented out, which was located at "catalog/includes/modules/shipping/table.php" looked like this:
just add // in front of that and move on.
finally, you need to make a call to the table method from the mltship.php file ("catalog/includes/modules/shipping/mltship.php"). You will find the following in that file:
Just make it look like this:
...and you should be good to go for using multiple shipping options.
i do still have one problem to figure out. if someone's order consists only of the items that are to be shipped free, then all is kosher. however, if someone throws in another item, one that uses the table rate, the table rate takes over and sets shipping based on the cost of the WHOLE order, not just of the items that are set to use the table rate. :blink:
not sure how to work this one out, but i'll keep ya posted. :)