Managing Pickup Locations in Zen Cart
If you are operating a farm using the Buying Club model, you will probably need
to maintain the list of Pickup Locations offered during the checkout
process. Customers can then choose where they want to pickup their orders.
Fortunately Zen Cart is flexible and open which allows us to create these custom
delivery options.
The first step is to clearly define your pickup locations. You may allow
product pickup directly at your farm. So that will be an easy one.
The Location Title could simply be "Farm Pickup." One word titles are
nice (like a city name), but if you need more, do keep it brief.
Next you need a brief Location Description of the location such as a
street address or business location (if that is where people will pick up their
products). The key word is BRIEF, since this will show up under a
series of radio buttons during the checkout process. Screen real
estate is valuable. So keep the Location Description as brief as
possible.
I will probably add some locations into your database when I do the installation
if you can provide them to me. But you will need to learn to work with the
process since over time you will almost certainly be making
adjustments/additions to your Pickup Locations list.
Pickup Location Editor
Most farm Zen Carts that require pickup locations can be managed from a special
table that I create in the database. I also create a special web page
admin for managing this table and will provide a link to it when installation is
complete.
You can go to this custom admin page and add, change, or delete pickup locations
in the future, saving my time and your money.
Zen Cart Admin Shipping Options
Once you have entered the Pickup Locations into the database table, they will
show up in your Zen Cart Admin Shipping options under the Modules tab.
Click on the Shipping option under the Modules tab. You will see a list of
shipping options that vary depending on how I have configured your cart.
It may look something like this:
You will need to enable each active pickup location (or disable if not currently
active). This is easy to do within the Admin. Just select the
location and click the Install Button. You can probably ignore most of the
special shipping options presented since most apply to products that are shipped
with traditional (i.e., UPS, USPS, etc) means.
Be sure to click the Update button or the location will not be installed.
You will notice that the red circle (dot) next to the location becomes green
when activated.
Do this for each active Pickup Location. You can add a sort order number
when you do the install process if you want the locations to show up in a
particular order in the checkout process.
You may want to deactivate certain locations for periods of time. Just
click the location and click on Remove in the editing box to the right.
Reinstall it when it needs to be active again.
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