How to configure shipping

Shipping can be very complicated. Depending on the domain, a wide variety of shipping scenarios are found in the wild. For instance, calculation of shipping costs can depend on:

  • Shipping method (e.g., standard, courier)

  • Shipping address

  • Time of day of order (e.g., if requesting next-day delivery)

  • Weight of items in basket

  • Customer type (e.g., business accounts get discounted shipping rates)

  • Offers and vouchers that give free or discounted shipping

Further complications can arise such as:

  • Only making certain shipping methods available to certain customers

  • Tax is only applicable in certain situations

Oscar can handle all of these shipping scenarios.

Shipping in Oscar

Configuring shipping charges requires overriding Oscar’s core ‘shipping’ app and providing your own Repository class (see Customising Oscar) that returns your chosen shipping method instances.

The primary responsibility of the Repository class is to provide the available shipping methods for a particular scenario. This is done via the get_shipping_methods() method, which returns the shipping methods available to the customer.

This method is called in several places:

  • To look up a “default” shipping method so that sample shipping charges can be shown on the basket detail page.

  • To list the available shipping methods on the checkout shipping method page.

  • To check the selected shipping method is still available when an order is submitted.

The get_shipping_methods method takes the basket, user, shipping address and request as parameters. These can be used to provide different sets of shipping methods depending on the circumstances. For instance, you could use the shipping address to provide international shipping rates if the address is overseas.

The get_default_shipping_method method takes the same parameters and returns default shipping method for the current basket. Used for shipping cost indication on the basket page. Defaults to free shipping method.

Note

Oscar’s checkout process includes a page for choosing your shipping method. If there is only one method available for your basket (as is the default) then it will be chosen automatically and the user immediately redirected to the next step.

Custom repositories

If the available shipping methods are the same for all customers and shipping addresses, then override the methods property of the repository:

from oscar.apps.shipping import repository
from . import methods

class Repository(repository.Repository):
    methods = (methods.Standard(), methods.Express())

For more complex logic, override the get_available_shipping_methods method:

from oscar.apps.shipping import repository
from . import methods

class Repository(repository.Repository):

    def get_available_shipping_methods(self, basket, user=None, shipping_addr=None, request=None, **kwargs):
        methods = (methods.Standard(),)
        if shipping_addr and shipping_addr.country.code == 'GB':
            # Express is only available in the UK
            methods = (methods.Standard(), methods.Express())
        return methods

Note that the get_shipping_methods method wraps get_available_shipping_methods in order to handle baskets that don’t require shipping and to apply shipping discounts.

Shipping methods

Shipping methods need to implement a certain API. They need to have the following properties which define the metadata about the shipping method:

  • code - This is used as an identifier for the shipping method and so should be unique amongst the shipping methods available in your shop.

  • name - The name of the shipping method. This will be visible to the customer during checkout.

  • description - An optional description of the shipping method. This can contain HTML.

Further, each method must implement a calculate method which accepts the basket instance as a parameter and returns a Price instance. Most shipping methods subclass Base, which stubs this API.

Here’s an example:

from oscar.apps.shipping import methods
from oscar.core import prices

class Standard(methods.Base):
    code = 'standard'
    name = 'Standard shipping (free)'

    def calculate(self, basket):
        return prices.Price(
            currency=basket.currency,
            excl_tax=D('0.00'), incl_tax=D('0.00'))

Core shipping methods

Oscar ships with several re-usable shipping methods which can be used as-is, or subclassed and customised:

  • Free - no shipping charges

  • FixedPrice - fixed-price shipping charges. Example usage:

from oscar.apps.shipping import methods
from oscar.core import prices

class Standard(methods.FixedPrice):
    code = 'standard'
    name = 'Standard shipping'
    charge_excl_tax = D('5.00')

class Express(methods.FixedPrice):
    code = 'express'
    name = 'Express shipping'
    charge_excl_tax = D('10.00')

There is also a weight-based shipping method, AbstractWeightBased which determines a shipping charge by calculating the weight of a basket’s contents and looking this up in a model-based set of weight bands.