Shipping Tables & Rules, Javascript, Buyer Messaging

Google Checkout's Carrier Calculated Shipping feature is a great shipping tool for US merchants. It obtains shipping rates from carriers (UPS, FedEx and USPS) and allows merchants to charge appropriate shipping rates for orders delivered within the United States.

Sometimes however, shipping calculations are more complex. Ideally, this is accomplished with your own carrier integrations. This allows you to perform practically any custom calculation. Integrations however, are quite complex and requires development and server resources you may not have. One possible solution: A shipping table.

US Carriers base shipment rates on zones - quite simply this represents a shipping origin and destination. The farther these are from each other, the higher the zone (and rate). You can obtain one from your carrier representative, along with their rates, combine it with your own custom charges, and come up with your shipping table. This might seem a lot of effort, but if direct carrier integration isn't within your reach, and built-in tools don't work for you, you're left with guesstimates.

This working sandbox sample uses a shipping table (aka "lookup table") and does so via Javascript. This sample should work across any HTML based implementation of Google Checkout (BUY NOW, HTML, Shopping Cart) with a few adjustments - a possible exception maybe the Store Gadget.

What the sample does:

• Controls shipping options display to specific areas (e.g. HI and AK restrictions/rates)
• Because shipping rates are tied to a table based on zones, restricts what zip code the order can be delivered to. Google will display
  "...this merchant does not ship to..."
  if the delivery zip code provided at checkout differs drastically from what is provided here.
• Ask for a permit for deliveries to certain States
• Uses Advanced Buyer Messaging (Beta) to provide a note on checkout containing detail on what is provided in this page

This sample uses delivery restrictions in order to enforce proper shipment cost calcuations. Therefore, to fully test the sample, if you provide a Hawaii zip code, you must provide a Hawaii address when checking out (Sandbox).