This article helps deal with creating offline services, these enable you to create a service that your customers can select, but that is not directly linked to a particular courier.
This enables you to deal with a number of different specific problems.
Examples:
1. You want to setup a Standard shipping option that the customer selects, but then you decide what service to use based on the best cost to you from the couriers you have available that can fulfil to that location within the required time period.
2. You cannot achieve the required setup using the standard weight/location based rules, or the courier restrictions are stopping services showing when required.
The process is very similar to creating a service described in this article: https://howto.citruslime.com/43293-courier-integration/293383-adding-a-service-to-my-shipping-options
Initially you need to go to 'EDIT / ADD SERVICES' as below:
Scroll down the page until you get to the 'Add Offline Services' section, within this section click the new link, and then fill out the information, in my example i am creating an option for Heavy items that are going to be sent internationally, the 'internal service name' is the name used to recognise the service for my staff, the 'base cost price' would be the minimum cost of that service to my business, the 'Base retail price' is the minimum price that customer will pay for that shipping service at checkout, the 'Cut off Time' is the time the courier theoretically collects the product, adjusting the minimum and maximum days to deliver will effect the estimated delivery date shown to the customer, the 'eCommerce basket name' is the name for the service that my customer will see on the front end of the site. Once these are all set i can tick to make the service active and to show on the front end of my website.
I now need to click the 'Add Countries to service' button to select the countries that i want to be able to use this service:
Once you have added the countries required, click 'Save Changes', this will then open up the option for you to adjust the delivery ranges for each country if needed, as an example for my 3 countries i know that it will take a lot less time to deliver to Belgium and i therefore adjust accordingly:
Once saved i now have a service that will only be available when customers that select one of the 3 countries assigned above go through the checkout process.
It is also worth mentioning that if you want those customers to only see this service you will need to exclude your other active services, the article linked below should explain the process for this:
