Shipping added to Membership

[bethalex]

I have a site with mainly physical products up to this point and have been using our PayPal shipping profile. We are now offering streaming content and downloads as well in member protected areas using eMember. Problem arises when I create a membership pay button, PayPal is adding shipping. Shipping gets added even if I check “Downloadable” and enter a digital product link.

Is turning off the PayPal shipping profile the only way to not charge shipping on digital/non-physical goods?

eStore version 6.2.7

eMember version 7.4.7

WordPress version 3.3

[admin]

PayPal profile shipping doesn’t distinguish between physical and digital items. Two possible workarounds for this:

Option 1

Specify an individual product shipping of zero (0) in the “Item Shipping Cost” field of the digital product. Given that this is the only item in the cart then it should override the profile shipping cost not charge shipping.

Option 2

Use weight based profile shipping. This way you can place a weight of 0.01 lbs (as an example) for your digital products and your physical products will have more weight. Now if your profile based shipping has a bracket like the following then digital items won’t get shipping charge

0 – 0.5 lbs (do not charge shipping) – Your digital items will fall in this bracket

0.5 – 2 lbs (charger whatever)

2 – 4 lbs (charge whatever)

…..

[bethalex]

I had already tried Option 1. It does not override the PayPal shipping cost profile. I’ll have to see if I can make Option 2 work for us.

[admin]

Are you using a “Buy Now” button to submit one product at a time or are you using a shopping cart?

This post might be helpful too:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/use-paypal-profile-based-shipping-checkbox

[bethalex]

I’m using an add to cart button.

I did try setting this in eStore_payment_submission.php: (but that didn’t work for me either.

$myPaypal->addField(‘shipping_1’, $shipping);

//$myPaypal->addField(‘handling_cart’, $shipping);

[bethalex]

Hurray!

I think I found the solution. From PayPal’s site I found the following page about configuring shipping profiles in PP: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_ProfileAndTools#id08A9EG0047X

This is the setting I changed: to YES

Use the shipping fee in the transaction instead of my claculator’s settings

Select whether the shipping rates can be overridden by individual transactions if the information is passed to PayPal with HTML variables in the transaction. Allowable values:

Yes

No

IMPORTANT: Changing the setting of a specific shipping method changes the setting for all U.S. domestic and international shipping methods that use the same currency.

Then in wp-eStore I turned off Use PayPal Profile Based Shipping in the settings panel under Payment Gateway Settings.

Then I changed this in eStore_payment_submission.php (comment out the second line): eStore_payment_submission.php:

$myPaypal->addField(‘shipping_1’, $shipping);

//$myPaypal->addField(‘handling_cart’, $shipping);

I put 0.001 in the shipping field of the member button product settings page

Some further testing to be done but looking good.

[StarCircleAcademy]

To be clear… are these instructions obsolete? Can’t you set the “Shipping + Tax” options all to “zero” (and it would make more sense if these all defaulted to zero for anything that has digital content.

Nevermind. I tried this and PayPal still asked me at checkout what kind of shipping I need… I guess I need to dig deeper.

[admin]

Hi, By default they are set to zero. Basically, you have configured PayPal profile based shipping and tax in your PayPal profile which is why you are seeing the issue. There are a few different ways users use the profile based shipping option… you will just need to configure it to suit your need. This post should help you:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/using-paypal-profile-shipping-but-it-is-charging-for-digital-items

[Author]

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