Shipping cost calculation is the mandatory feature for any E-Commerce website. Shipping cost is dependent upon zones and/or countries. It largely depends upon your requirement whether you need to charge different rates for different zones inside same country. You might want to do the same for multiple countries as well with or without multiple zones inside each country, only that in this case your task will become a lot more complex.
I have recently implemented few osCommerce stores and this is how I managed to get this implemented. Project requirement was to charge Int’l shipping rates for multiple countries for each weight slab. This can be achieved by MultiGeoZone MultiTable contribution. In addition to define shipping cost for multiple zones, this great contribution allows you to define multiple table rates based on either weight or price of the product allowing shipping to multiple Geo Zones using multiple tables.
Geo Zones are defined in the osCommerce administration tool using “Locations / Taxes >> Tax Zones” and it’s all in your hand to define these zones. Since you might be defining some zones for tax calculation, you need to prepend the names the shipping zones with “Shp:” keyword for it to be used with MZMT contribution. Geo Zones can be just specific zones of a country, a number of different countries, or any combination of these.
For instance, if you ship to multiple countries, you will have to implemenet a table of shipping rates. This table has countires grouped together under one column and their rates are defined as per weight ranges up to 25 kgs. All you have to do is to create same number of Shipping zones as table columns for each country group. After creating these Shipping zones, go ahead and insert each country(with all its zones) in corresponding shipping zone. Once you have all shipping zones ready with assigned countries, enable the MZMT contribution options from configuration and define number of shipping zones.
You must to set how many shipping zones you need to implement, before you could install and setup the MZMT contribution correctly from “Modules > Shipping”.
You can download MultiGeoZone MultiTable contribution from here
Hope that helps.
Cheers!