Free shipping for specific Magento products
Wednesday, 04 August 2010The name itself is already a mouthful: The shopping cart price rules in Magento allow you to modify the price listed in the shopping cart, based on certain rules. These rules can get quiet complicated - this individual example shows you how weird it can get.
Allow free shipping for certain products only
The goal was simple: Setup a price rule that allows for free shipping of certain products. Configuring this rule was thought to be easy: Define a rule and make sure that the free shipping gets applied to a defined set of products.
But when testing this in the field, this actually was a lot more complicated: Shipping costs were not applied to each product individually, but to the total amount of products. So if a discounted product was added to the cart, free shipping should be applied. But if a second product - that was not in the list - was added to the cart, the free shipping should be removed.
Redefine the rule
So we had to redefine the rule: Only apply the free shipping, if the shopping cart is containing only products that are defined in the list. Yet differently defined: Do not apply the rule of free shipping at all, if the cart contains products that are not in the list.
In this case the Actions of the price rule were not exciting at all, but the Conditions contain the real magic: The rule is defined in such a way that it makes sure that all products in the shopping cart are products that have a SKU matching the list.
Note that the rule actually does not use Free shipping at all, but just gives a solid discount of 2.25. It just depends on the Shipping Method you're using whether this makes sense or not. Some shipping methods do not allow for free shipping, but a solid discount would bypass this problem.
Hope this example serves some purpose.