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Break UK Shipping Zone in to Regions to Exclude Northern Ireland


onebrowncow

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This may be a feature request or impractical, but at the moment I cannot see a way to break the all in one shipping extension in to regions for the United Kingdom unless you enter all the UK postcodes.

In particular I want to be able to exclude Northern Ireland from UK shipping due to changes brought about by Brexit which will come in to effect on 1st April.

Ideally rather than entering all the postcodes for the UK which is a lot! it would be possible for the United Kingdom regions to include an option to exclude Northern Ireland however I appreciate this may not provide a perfect solution or even be possible.

 

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This often had to be done even before the whole Brexit thing with NI in order to split areas like the Highlands and Islands or Isle of Man / Isle of Wight etc off into separate postal regions.  It can only be done via postcode but is pretty easy and quick to do - remember that you can use partial postcodes when defining post code regions and it is easy to find the first 4 characters of the postcode regions covering these areas

Ian

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Thanks Ian, I thought this might be the response. The only thing I can't see is an option to exclude postcodes from a shipping zone so the list of postcodes to enter needs to be those you do ship too, is that correct or have I missed something?

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You dont need to.  Define the small specific areas by postcode and ensure that these are at the top of the list AND that you select "Use first matching zone only".  The after all of the exceptions are covered it is followed by a UK wide zone by country which catches everything else but will never be reached for your exceptions

Ian

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Defining NI as a shipping zone and having AIOS find "first-matching" will still select it.

Nowhere in AIOS is there an option to actually prohibit a zone.

However, by abusing the shipping rates, we can cause a zone to be ineligible for consideration. For example, if the AIOS module has a 'Order Weight Limits" ranges, we can say that this zone is only eligible if the total weight of the order is at least 10,000 kilos.

On the other hand, that just may mean the next zone - all of UK, which perhaps encompasses NI - will catch it.

On the third hand, should we now make NI a separate country?

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1 hour ago, bsmither said:

On the third hand, should we now make NI a separate country?

No because it isnt a separate country - that would be like making California a different country !

1 hour ago, bsmither said:

Nowhere in AIOS is there an option to actually prohibit a zone.

There is no need to do this and this isnt what the OP requested.

@onebrowncow if you want to contact me via PM or via our website then I can help you configure this - we do it all of the time for our clients and it works very well

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"that would be like making California a different country!"

Once California successfully secedes from the USA (aka, 'Calexit'), it will be.

So, what is it about NI via Brexit that makes shipping so problematic if NI is still part of UK?

"this isn't what the OP requested"

OP: "exclude Northern Ireland from UK shipping"

This is how I read what OP wanted.

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I need more info regarding Northern Ireland. I don't see it in either the Countries nor the Zones tab of Countries/Zones.

Well, I now see that NI comprises six counties, and those names do appear in the United Kingdom section of the Zones tab.

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Quote

So, what is it about NI via Brexit that makes shipping so problematic if NI is still part of UK?

Although Northern Ireland is part of the UK at Brexit Northern Ireland has remained part of the EU's single market for goods while the rest of the UK has left, from 1st April goods sent to NI from the rest of the UK will be subject to customs and import Taxes. A Google search for "what is the Irish sea border" will provide a more in depth explanation of what is happening.

Expanding on my original thought of excluding NI from shipping rates:
As the NI counties are already listed in AIOS, rather than going to the trouble of entering all the UK postcodes would it not be simpler to define the UK zone in AIOS by adding all the counties shipping is available to by entering them under the option "what will this zone contain?" "one or more states/provinces" and exclude the NI counties from this option, thus making them excluded from the UK shipping rates table and by default returning no shipping rates/options for NI if they are not including and those NI counties are not put in to any other zone.

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9 minutes ago, onebrowncow said:

As the NI counties are already listed in AIOS, rather than going to the trouble of entering all the UK postcodes

You can do it by counties but postcodes give you more granular control and postcodes are also always a required field - there are often issues with people being able to enter addresses without a county.  You also dont need to enter all UK postcodes, only those to define your NI zone which is a handful

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The thing about AIOS zones, is that even if no other user-configured zone satisfies a targeted region, there will always be -Rest of World- which cannot be deleted.

The -Rest of World- can, however, have shipping rates that cannot be matched.

But if one takes that strategy, there must then be a zone(s) that cover all countries that one is willing to ship to.

 

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"Rather than going to the trouble of entering all the UK postcodes would it not be simpler to define the UK zone in AIOS by adding all the counties shipping is available to by entering them under the option "what will this zone contain?" "one or more states/provinces" and exclude the NI counties from this option?"

Shipping to NI, AIOS will not match the zone set for UK with having all counties, except the six in NI, listed. As I said, AIOS will continue to try and find a zone that will match. It will always find the -Rest of World- zone, and will return a shipping rate(s) if there is a rate(s) that satisfy the basket details.

According to the database, UK has a total of 206 counties. Ugh!

Contrariwise, if AIOS matches a zone that must not be shipped to, it is far easier to describe that - for example, to Antarctica, or to those six counties in NI, or a very specific postal code (or range).

So, I have made edits to AIOS that adds a "deny" flag to the zone description. That means, if your products must not ship to Texas in the USA, a zone with that description would be created and the Deny flag set. Thus, any order that has as a destination address to anywhere in Texas will not have a shipping rate offered by AIOS.

(Other shipping modules could very well provide a shipping charge. Their modules can only approve or deny whole countries and are restricted to allowing that setting to apply only to 'enabled' countries. AIOS does not (yet) honor that setting.)

The edits are not extensive. If interested, send me a PM with your email address.

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23 hours ago, havenswift-hosting said:

You can do it by counties but postcodes give you more granular control and postcodes are also always a required field - there are often issues with people being able to enter addresses without a county.  You also dont need to enter all UK postcodes, only those to define your NI zone which is a handful

Good point re counties not being required. Back to the postcodes.

3 hours ago, bsmither said:

"Rather than going to the trouble of entering all the UK postcodes would it not be simpler to define the UK zone in AIOS by adding all the counties shipping is available to by entering them under the option "what will this zone contain?" "one or more states/provinces" and exclude the NI counties from this option?"

Shipping to NI, AIOS will not match the zone set for UK with having all counties, except the six in NI, listed. As I said, AIOS will continue to try and find a zone that will match. It will always find the -Rest of World- zone, and will return a shipping rate(s) if there is a rate(s) that satisfy the basket details.

According to the database, UK has a total of 206 counties. Ugh!

Contrariwise, if AIOS matches a zone that must not be shipped to, it is far easier to describe that - for example, to Antarctica, or to those six counties in NI, or a very specific postal code (or range).

So, I have made edits to AIOS that adds a "deny" flag to the zone description. That means, if your products must not ship to Texas in the USA, a zone with that description would be created and the Deny flag set. Thus, any order that has as a destination address to anywhere in Texas will not have a shipping rate offered by AIOS.

(Other shipping modules could very well provide a shipping charge. Their modules can only approve or deny whole countries and are restricted to allowing that setting to apply only to 'enabled' countries. AIOS does not (yet) honor that setting.)

The edits are not extensive. If interested, send me a PM with your email address.

Interesting idea re a flag to deny a zone.
Maybe this is something to develop for a future version of AIOS. I only ship to selected countries but often get asked to ship to countries not in our zones. So a way to flag a country, state, province or county as exclude which would also return a message to the customer to say "sorry no shipping is available to your (exact location here) " would save me several emails a month reply to requests to ship to specific locations.

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In AIOS would selecting the enabled status 'Zone Required'  make people have to enter their county/state?  NI only has 6.

In AIOS how do we add a range of postcodes, can we put an hypenated range such as BT1-BT94 or can we just use the BT* or do they need to be put in full comma separated list such as

BT1,BT2,BT3,BT4,BT5,BT6,BT7,BT8,BT9,BT10,BT11,BT12,BT13,BT14,BT15,BT16,BT17,BT18,BT19,BT20,BT21,BT22,BT23,BT24,BT25,BT26,BT27,BT28,BT29,BT30,BT31,BT32,BT33,BT34,BT35,BT36,BT37,BT38,BT39,BT40,BT41,BT42,BT43,BT44,BT45,BT46,BT47,BT48,BT49,BT50,BT51,BT52,BT53,BT54,BT55,BT56,BT57,BT58,BT59,BT60,BT61,BT62,BT63,BT64,BT65,BT66 ,BT67,BT68,BT69,BT70,BT71,BT72,BT73,BT74,BT75,BT76,BT77,BT78,BT79,BT80,BT81,BT82 ,BT83,BT92,BT93,BT94

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"In AIOS would selecting the enabled status 'Zone Required'..."

I don't follow what you are describing. What enabled status?

The admin can enter BT* and AIOS shipping will treat any postcode that starts with BT as being part of this zone.

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In settings: Countries/Zones tab there is the option in each country to Disable or to Enable(Zone Required) , Enable(Zone Optional) , Enable(Zone Disabled).

I currently have mine set to optional and customers aren't required to select their County, if I change it to Required then they must select a county from the list. So I was thinking that as Northern Ireland only has 6 counties this could be set simpler than inputting loads of postcodes.

But as you have explained above we can use the BT* which simplifies it even more. Thanks am going to go look at our shipping now and try work some rules out.

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Ah! In admin, Countries/Zones (which has nothing to do with AIOS), countries and country/states can be disabled. They can even be deleted.

When configuring AIOS, that enable/disable setting is ignored. (See:https://github.com/cubecart/v6/issues/2754)

Should the admin decide to never ship to a particular country or county/state, then I think it would work to actually delete them. If they aren't in the database, AIOS won't list  them - and neither will any other part of Cubecart.

 

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