Apologies if this is a duplicate, I did try to look through the Ideas boards (even the Developer's Ideas board), as I was sure the request existed.
This is a perennial source of difficulty and confusion for a great many licensees: figuring out how to ship, and how to allow customers to select shipping for carts with multiple and often shipping-incompatible items.
Let's say I sell tickets, access to streaming events, and gift certificates.
Tickets I only supply in these post-COVID days via E-Ticket delivery. Streaming events of course have no tickets, you just come to the site. And gift certificates must be mailed. I fundamentally cannot come up with a shipping system that allows for even two of the three items to appear in one cart.
Like most licensees, we use a series of complex rules (specifically for TNEW) and paragraphs of special instructions and explanation, in multiple areas, to try to work the customers through all of the awkwardness, but the obvious answer is that things which are to be delivered via different method should simply have those methods registered and applied. Also, if items can be delivered by more than one method, it would be nice if beyond specifying shipping method restrictions we could also specify preferred/default shipping methods on an item by item basis.
We could then move this configuration into the client from TNEW, simplifying the life of cashiers as well. The configuration would be removed from Mode of Sale, where I believe it is no longer useful. Allowed and default Shipping Methods would then be able to be configured separately to:
- Production Elements and Packages
- Gift Certificates (and any other "purchasable" Payment Methods, such as On Account methods used for donations in ticketing orders)
- Fees (some organizations repurpose Fees to appear as items in some cases)
- Price Types (this increases complexity as it intersects with Production Elements, but has easy to imagine use cases: for instance, if we want to force purchasers of student tickets to come to the Will Call window to present an ID, we would want to force any of those line items to HABO even if other tickets in the order could be delivered digitally)
Configuration would need to be a lot simpler than the current TNEW System Table: it is so onerous (and prone to error!) for us that I have developed a customization to allow the Ticket Office to set shipping methods by applying Keywords. This way they can push out changes to a whole season with one Season Manager command. Part of this would be solved by having default configuration options, say for each of the items listed above, maybe also configuration options also for Seasons or Performance Types, and Price Type Groups. This might amount to a series of System Tables of increasing specificity, although Keywords or Content could be used for Production Elements and Packages.