Requiring user to select two shipping methods

[kerm1t]

Hi,

 

Hope this is the right forum.

 

The majority of the products in my store are sent directly by us to the customer, but I also have some (limited to a couple of categories) which are delivered nationally directly by the supplier. This raises problems with shipping: on a 'mixed' order, we need to charge two lots of shipping. For our products, we have several shipping methods/prices, and the same would apply for the special category too (eg there'd be national next day, national 2-3 days, national 3-5 days, all at different prices).

 

I could just about write a shipping module which would spot any of these special products in the basket and display appropriate shipping options, but I'm not sure how I'd get OSC to allow the user to select two shipping options (eg "i want standard parcel for items 1, 2 and 3, and national next day on item 4").

 

So then I thought about other ways of doing it. Eg, we could create some dummy items called 'national next day', 'national 2-3 days' etc. The user would then need to place one of these in their basket if they bought an item from the special category. If we went down that route, we'd need to make sure the user did add one of these dummy products to their basket.

 

Unfortunately, simply adding the shipping costs to the item price isn't an option - it'd make us appear more expensive then our competitors.

 

I'm sure someone must have been in this situation before, so any thoughts on the matter would be very much appreciated