Zen Cart

  Forcing your checkout process to default currency in Zen Cart

Sometimes, the owners of ecommerce system would like to force the customers to choose store's default/chosen currency and why is that? Because, the instability of worldwide economy may cause the storeowners to loss profits during currency converting. Therefore, the storeowners have to ensure that it doesn't affect them by forcing their customers to select default currency (normally, it's the currency where the storeowner resides) during checkout process.

The easy way is to hide the currency converter pulldown menu once the customer entered the checkout process and set the current currency to your chosen/default currency. The steps explained here assume that currency converter is placed on the header instead of sidebar menu as it's way neater and you have to use the override system to have your own theme:

1. Put the code below on your /includes/templates/your_own_theme/common/tpl.header.php

  1.    $checkout_shipping = '/index.php?main_page=checkout_shipping';
  2.    $checkout_payment= '/index.php?main_page=checkout_payment';
  3.    $checkout_confirm= '/index.php?main_page=checkout_confirmation';
  4.    $request_url=$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
  5.  
  6.    if ($request_url == $checkout_shipping || $request_url == $checkout_payment || $request_url == $checkout_confirm)
  7.    {
  8.       $_SESSION['currency'] = 'AUD';
  9.    }



Posted by eangkasa | 05/12/2008 Bookmark and Share

  Difference between Zone Rates & Zone Table Rates in Zen Cart

I have come across this question before and for some time i was confused what would be the difference between Zen Cart preinstalled Zone Rates and this plugin "Zone Table Rates" available at here.

Alright, this is a brief summary of each purpose:

Zone Rates allows to define multiple shipping rates based on countries only, so you can setup let's say 3 (as the default) shipping rates with different countries attached to it.

Meanwhile, Zone Table Rates allows to define multiple shipping rates based on "Zone Definition", for those who doesnt know zone definition means, it is where we can setup a zone area down through states/provinces. So, for example you want to setup zone 1 covering Indonesia in Jakarta & Bali combined with USA in California & NY, we can do that easily.

Once we setup our zone definition, then we can define our own shipping rates using Zone Table Rates and attached our predefined Zone Definition to it, and you're done.



Posted by eangkasa | 04/12/2008 Bookmark and Share