Combine multiple shipping carrier rates with different shipping methods into one rate

Question

Looking for a plugin or a way to combine shipping rates for multiple items that ship through multiple carriers into a single rate during checkout. Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

Item 1: ships UPS (Rates are pulled from our UPS account) Item 2: ships LTL (Rates are pulled from our LTL account) Item 3: ships Flat Rate (per product)

All are in the same cart looking to be purchased at the same time.

(Currently on Dev. Site) Each individual shipping method is shown to customer and they can only select one option. This means that my store would not capture shipping cost for any of the other items in the cart. Is there a way capture various shipping method rates into a rate for the customer during checkout. If so - additionally, is there a way to give additional options based off a multiplier for rush delivery services? Thanks for any input on this.

Answer 1

By default that isn't possible, you must, at least implement:

• A custom Shipping Method
• A custom Shipping Form for your method, to allow customer select different shipping method for each item.
• Create sales_quote_item and sales_order_item attributes to save customer method selection

Your custom shipping method must handle all that logic, you need to split all items/weights and calculate the individual/total shipping cost/price and eventually some combination too ie:

- item 1 by usps = $10.
- item 2 by usps = $10.
- item 1 and 2 by usps = $15

Your shipping method must be able to:

• Obtain the shipping cost/price from the others shipping methods (for each single or combination possible item selection)
• Save customer shipping selection to sales_quote_item
• Recalculate all that data in all further steps in checkout
• Save quote_item data to order_item
• Re-implement any other -parent- shipping method feature, like Api calls for pickup, packages generation or tracking number getters

Finally if you want to give your customers a good communication feedback, you should modify all "post place order" email and templates in order to display all that information.

IMO is a lot of work to do, and I can't figure out a real-life case in which such effort would by justified.

EDIT

I'm not totally sure, but a partial use of some dropship extension may help... I guess