EasyStore Shipping Plugin – Passing Shipping Status To Checkout
BP
Bruce Paine
Dear Joomshaper Support Team,
A further feature request has arisen while continuing development of my custom shipping plugin.
The plugin can determine useful outcomes from the shipping-rate lookup that are not simply "shipping available" or "shipping unavailable" — for example, a missing suburb, an invalid address, no suitable rate for the supplied address, an order exceeding our shipping limit, or an API error.
At present, when the plugin returns no shipping methods, EasyStore displays the generic:
"No shipping available currently for this region."
It would be very useful if a custom shipping plugin could optionally return a status value alongside the normal shipping-method data, allowing the checkout to display an appropriate customer-facing message.
I have currently achieved this by making small modifications to EasyStore's CheckoutController.php and checkout JavaScript, but of course those changes could be overwritten by a future EasyStore update.
Would you consider providing a supported mechanism for shipping plugins to pass such status information back to the checkout?
If there is already a supported way of achieving this, I would be very interested to know about it.
Thanks,
Bruce
3 Answers
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Ziaul Kabir
Accepted AnswerHi Bruce,
Thank you for the detailed feature request.
There is currently no supported way for a shipping plugin to pass a custom status or customer-facing message back to the checkout. The onEasyStoreGetShippingMethods event only accepts the list of available shipping methods and prices in return — there is no additional status or message channel.
For custom shipping carrier integrations, please follow the approach described in our documentation, which uses that event to retrieve and return the available methods:
EasyStore – Custom Shipping Carrier Integration
When a plugin returns no shipping methods, the checkout shows the generic "No shipping available currently for this region." message, and there is currently no way to override that per-scenario.
Your changes to CheckoutController.php and the checkout JavaScript are therefore custom modifications to core files and will be overwritten on the next EasyStore update.
We appreciate the suggestion and will consider adding a supported mechanism for shipping plugins to return status information to the checkout in a future version.
Thanks
BP
Bruce Paine
Accepted AnswerHi - Thanks for the documentation link.
Apologies for any misunderstanding but I have already followed the documented approach for the custom shipping carrier integration, and the plugin is successfully returning NZ Couriers rates through the onEasyStoreGetShippingMethods event.
Just confirming that my question about the status information is slightly different. The plugin is able to determine why no shipping method is being returned — for example, because a suburb is missing or the supplied address cannot obtain a rate — but the event currently provides no way for the plugin to communicate that reason back to the checkout.
The documentation appears to cover returning available shipping methods, but not communicating a status or reason when no methods are returned. This is the specific capability I was suggesting as a feature request.
Thanks for confirming that you will consider adding such a mechanism in a future version.
In the meantime, I will keep reintroducing my customisations whenever there are EasyStore updates.