Shipping quote settings admin is confusing [#499872]

The Shipping quote settings page at admin/store/settings/quotes/methods is baffling.

First of all, it should choke and give an error if no shipping modules are enabled.

Second, having enabled flat rate, it's still baffling. There's an empty table that looks broken and repeated mentions of 'small package'. What's small package? It looks like some kind of shipping method, but checkout is still saying I can't proceed.

Third, having created a flat rate shipping type, I still see this small package thing all over. It's apparently (I'm told on IRC) an attribute of a product, but as it appears here my initial reading of it was that it was a shipping technique, as in "send a small package in the post".

Comments

Comment #1

TR CreditAttribution: TR commented 13 March 2010 at 09:08

Version:	5.x-1.7	» 6.x-2.x-dev
Category:	bug	» feature

Moving this to the 6.x-2.x queue and re-classifying this as a feature request. If you have any specific suggestions for usability improvement I'm open to modifying those pages.

Comment #2

TR CreditAttribution: TR commented 28 March 2010 at 04:21

Status:

Active

» Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

Comment #3

TR CreditAttribution: TR commented 6 February 2011 at 06:35

Status:

Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

» Closed (won't fix)

No response, so I'm going to assume this isn't an issue anymore.

Comment #4

joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented 6 February 2011 at 08:28

Status:

Closed (won't fix)

» Active

I don't understand how it's meant to work, so I'm not really well placed to offer suggestions, sorry.

Comment #5

longwave

he/him

English

CreditAttribution: longwave commented 12 February 2011 at 17:25

This ties in with #830514: Allow user-defined product shipping types. Should we just hide the "small package" shipping type selection if that's the only option? It would reduce confusion, and it's only currently useful if the user has UPS or USPS or something installed which provides more shipping types.

Comment #6

longwave

he/him

English

CreditAttribution: longwave commented 1 August 2011 at 16:35

Version:

6.x-2.x-dev

» 7.x-3.x-dev

Bumping to 7.x. Shipping quote settings is probably the last remaining config section in 7.x that could do with an overhaul.

Comment #7

longwave

he/him

English

CreditAttribution: longwave commented 13 October 2011 at 14:13

Assigned:

Unassigned

» TR

I still think we need to do something about this in 7.x, but I'm not sure what - not using UPS or USPS, I don't understand it fully either.

"Determines which shipping methods are quoted at checkout when products of different shipping types are ordered. Larger values take precedence."

This doesn't make much sense to me, and only seems to be of use when you have USPS installed (and perhaps some contrib shipping methods?) when more than just "small package" is available. Proposals:

Reword this text
Hide this section entirely if only "small package" is available
Convert the dropdowns into a drag/drop list so it's more intuitive

Similarly do we need the "Default order fulfillment type for products" setting here and "Default product shipping type" on the node edit page if only "small package" is available?

Assigning to TR as perhaps he understands this section more than me!