Overview

The Premium MatrixRate extension is based on the popular community extension Matrix Rate. If you are upgrading from the community extension and do not want to make the full transition in one big step, this extension runs seamlessly alongside our Matrix Rate Community Extension. 

It has got a lot of additional features in over and above MatrixRate, including:

• Support for multiple countries, regions and/or zip/post codes on single line
• Ability to filter on weight, price and #items combined
• Ability to filter on Volume Weight (and/or weight combined)
• Capability to charge additional charge per unit of weight
• Google Checkout compatibility
• Ability to calculate shipping on Cart prices including tax
• Ability to change the sort order of rates output
• Ability to set cheapest shipping method as free

Additionally it has all the standard MatrixRate features:

• Completely csv driven, no coding required to change prices, add rates, etc
• Allows multiple postage rates to be displayed for the customer to choose from
• Zip code based filtering. Can either use the basic “starts with” criteria, or more complex pattern matching
• Support for numerical zip code ranges – e.g. specify a price that applies to all postcodes within the range 9755-9999
• To be able to specify an upper and lower boundary for price, weight, or item vs destination rates

The management of shipping rates is done via a csv file, which is uploaded to the database. Shipping calculations are then done via sql searches, providing efficient results.

Deciding what you want to achieve

The first step to using this extension is to think about how you want to use it. Some of the questions you should be asking are:

1. What delivery types do you have?
2. What rules will you define for those delivery types?
3. Do I wish to filter shipping based on:

• Destination
• Price
• Weight
• #Items

If you have a set of business requirements and are struggling to translate these into logical rules that can be implemented in an extension why not let us do help you at WebShopApps? We have extensive knowledge not just of our extensions but also of shipping and how it works. There aren’t many scenarios we haven’t seen.

We can provide ’starter’ csv files based on your requirements, together with comprehensive advise for your particular scenario and how best to implement to achieve the right shipping rates. We can do as little as a sample configuration right up to full install and setup.

If you need capabilities around handling customer groups, percentage actions, or product based filtering then you will need to look at our ProductMatrix extension. This encompasses all the features of Premium Rate with these extra capabilities.

Using this Knowledge Base

With Premium Rate there are a small number of steps that must be followed to get yourself successfully up and running. If you follow these steps as we advise you are unlikely to encounter issues and hopefully will be getting shipping rates within a very short period of time.

Premium Rate will do all database edits for you as part of the installation, and add required attributes to the magento installation.  It will not configure shipping rates for you (unfortunately!).

Here are the steps to a successful Premium Rate installation. Once you have completed each section refer back here for the next step.

 

Further Assistance

There are  a wealth of examples in the Knowledge Base along with screencasts that show you an example setup.

If you are having problems with your configuration our Premium Rate and General Troubleshooting guides will assist you.