Custom Magento 2 Shipping Extension: Handling Multi Carrier Shipping with Ease

Since its very origin, Magento has attracted e-commerce businesses who aim to deliver a robust and efficient e-commerce store. With its complex internal wiring, the platform has helped hundreds of thousands of merchants around the Globe. With market leaders like Coca Cola and Ford, the list of Magento-based websites is long and exciting.

As a leading E-commerce software, Magento has proved its stay with its exceptional abilities to handle e-commerce operations. The global community of Magento developers has contributed the Magento Marketplace with business-oriented ready-made extensions that can help the merchant expand their store’s capabilities.

On a similar note, the experienced custom Magento development team at The Brihaspati Infotech had an opportunity to build a Magento custom Shipping method extension for our valuable clients. The multi-carrier shipping extension for Magento 2 serves as a plug and play option for the vendors.

With this blog, we will discuss the Custom Magento 2 shipping extension, its need, and its specialty. Let’s get started.

Default Shipping Methods in Magento 2

Magento 1 is already outdated. The remaining support will be officially called off by June this year. If you weren’t aware of the news, we offer services to Migrate Magento 1 stores to Magento 2. You can ask us for the same.

Back to the shipping methods, Magento 2 offers 7 methods. We classify them to the following 4 methods:

• Free Shipping: The merchants hold 100% of the shipping charge at their end. The user isn’t charged a penny to get the product delivered.
• Flat rates: The merchants impose a fixed delivery charge regardless of the product quantity and other factors leading to a change in shipping rates.
• Table rates: The merchant can define rate sheets per their convenience where the final rates are dependent on the product size, quantity, and variant. For a better understanding, we have a similar explanation here: Table rate shipping.
• Standard shipping carriers: The merchants can let private carriers handle default shipping rates per their model. Magento supports the likes of UPS, USPS, FedEx and DHL.

And there are hundreds of ready-made shipping extensions in the Magento Marketplace that let you implement any shipping method of your choice, automating the age-old processes to handle dynamic shipping charges.

However, every business model is different. Merchants love to buy unique ideas that make their business stand out of the crowd leaving their customers with matchless user experience. That’s when they realize the need to get developed custom Magento extensions.

Need for developing a Custom Shipping Method in Magento 2

The Baymard Institute found that shoppers abandon their carts due to additional costs being imposed were too high which included the likes of shipping, taxes, and fees (60%). Above all, 23% accepted that they abandoned the cart just because they failed to see or calculate the total order costs upfront.

At this, businessmen can avail their stores with multiple shipping options allowing the shoppers to select any shipping option per their convenience. The store customers can thus have flexible shipping options to select from.

But then again, you can’t avail the same set of shipping methods for users from different locations. Based on the location, you can either levy flat charges or impose real-time shipping charges through the giants like UPS and USPS. Not to mention, the carrier services deliver fixed locations only.

At this point, Magento store owners find it difficult to manage multiple carriers and respective shipping rates. Of course, the Magento Marketplace has several extensions that integrate your store with carrier providers, but their loyalty limits you with a single shipping service only. At this, you are left out with the only option to integrate individual shipment services to your e-store.

Summing that up, we have the following challenges:

• Managing multiple carrier series providers
• Checking availability of their services in the shopper’s location.
• Charges levied by each carrier services

Our Magento 2 Multi-carrier shipping extension resolves all the queries to perfection.

Features of custom shipping extension in Magento 2

Managing multiple carrier services

One of the major challenges was to shortlist the available carrier service providers among numerous national and international carrier brands for the region. As said earlier, Magento 2 supports a big list of carrier service providers. Our job was to filter them. At the time of entering the delivery address, users need to enter the ZIP code. We used the field to request an API call to the custom Magento extension.

Our Magento 2 multi-carrier Shipping extension processes the ZIP code to filter the service providers for the given region. For the same, the API utilizes a third party database offered by the carrier services. The Magneto 2 Multi-carrier shipping extension matches them and effectively calculates the shipping rates.

Here is a complete elaboration of the working model:

1. 1. Enter the Zip code
2. 2. The ZIP code requests the extension
3. 3. The API matches the ZIP code with the regional coverage of the delivery services.

1. 4. The API receives requests for all the delivery services available for the region along with the price involved for every provider.

Display carrier options on the cart page

The best part about our custom Magento shipping method is the ability to display the available carrier services for the shopper. What is the point of displaying even the carriers that don’t offer their services in the shopper’s region? It will only ambiguity for all the three participants in the model- the merchant, the carrier service and the end-user. We thus went for a dynamic display of the delivery services.

Now that the service providers have been filtered, our extension displays the only available services for the said region.

By default, the Magento custom shipping extension isn’t present on the cart page. However, when the user enters Zip code, the Magento custom shipping method extension displays the services at the page bottom.

Plug and play option

The Magento custom shipping extension is designed to ease the shipping management for the vendors. They can now manage complex shipping charges with ease. The extension serves its purpose with an easy plug-and-play.

The admin can enable or disable the Magento Custom Shipping method with a click. As a merchant, you don’t have to write codes to make the best out of the multi-carrier shipping extension. It will integrate with your  Magento store like a miracle.

With all those features, the extension comes up as a unified solution that allows the vendors to ship with multiple carrier options.

Our experience with custom Magento Extension development

The expert Magento 2 developers at The Brihaspati Infotech possess 10+ years of experience at delivering custom ecommerce solutions. The kind of services includes the likes of store enhancement, API designs, and extensions to support third-party integrations.

In one of our previous blogs, we have discussed the development of Magento 2 multi-store store location extension, installing which the admin can manage their multiple stores with ease.

Our Magento 2 extension development services can help expanding your e-commerce services by numbers.

Final words on Custom Magento 2 Shipping Extension

B2B businesses can either be a burden or a boon depends on how you deal with them. Having said that the platforms are different, a custom API can bridge that gap pretty well. Added to that, you can scale your store’s offerings like never before.

If your store also seeks customization or you are facing issues while integrating services, you can hire Magento 2 developers directly from us. Our experts offer professional consultancy to scale your e-commerce store, for which you can contact us or can drop us an email.