The Zone Module Vendor Category component takes care of a primary need for many multi-vendor and multi-national VirtueMart stores. Here are examples of how it used:
- Your customer places an order from your store. One item on the order is from your warehouse in the US and another item is coming from a vendor you work with in Canada. Obviously it is not worthwhile to have the vendor's item shipped to you first because the shipping would likely discourage the buyer. Plus you'd have to inspect, repackage & re-ship the item. So you need to:
- Provide the customer with a shipping quote for the US item and combine that quoted amount with a quote for the Canadian item.
- Have the ability to create one shipping label from your location and also have the option to create a shipping label for use by your the Canadian vendor from their location.
This module will allow you to do just that when used with a CodeDonors.com shipping module like FedEx Complete. Quotes are combined to give your customer the most accurate real-time quote possible based on the two shipments instead of hacking around with flat-rate shipping prices. In your a module that is capable of multi-national label creation like FedEx Complete you will then have the option to create your shipping label and also to create your external vendor's label which can be e-mailed to that vendor.
- Now say for example your vendor has two locations. One in Canada and one in the US as well. You need to be able to specify which zones to ship to for that Canadian warehouse and also for the US warehouse. This is even more important when one of the vendor locations is overseas. With this module you'll be able to do just that. For example... ABC Company Children's Books has a location in Toronto and they also have one in Dallas. A customer from Vancouver, British Columbia orders some of your books and also orders ABC Company books. By setting Canada as the a zone for the Canadian warehouse you will be able to quote from that warehouse and have that quote combined with the quote for your US shipment to Canada. A shipping label will be created for your books only and you can create a separate label for the Canadian shipment if you'd like.
If the order was for a US customer then the ABC Company books would be quoted for shipping from the ABC Company's US warehouse because you would set that US warehouse as the address for the US zone for use with module FedEx Complete.
- Now ABC Company has both a Canadian and a US location for children's books. But they only ship textbooks from their Canadian warehouse. You'll need to specify this too. This is where category comes in to play.
So now you probably see why we call it "Zone Module Vendor Category". When you create a record you are telling the system:
When shipping to [Zone] with [Shipping Module] and the product vendor is [Vendor] and the product is in [Category] I want to ship from this address.
The component provides the ultimate in versatility because it allows you to:
- Share categories between vendors while keeping the shipping separate
- Have alternate vendor addresses for specific categories that are tied back to the one VirtueMart vendor record
In the near future you will be able to:
- Use specific shipping methods with certain vendors (quotes will be combined to a standard or expedite shipping descriptor)
- Use specific shipping methods with certain categories (when shipping from the same vendor one of the methods will be given preference)