Integration Guide: Frontend Submissions and Simple Shipping

Easy Digital Downloads and Frontend Submissions are designed to sell digital products. However, there are occasions when physical goods which are subject to shipping charges need to be sold as well in the same store. For this reason we created our Simple Shipping extension, which adds basic features for setting shipping costs on any applicable product. Below you can read how the Simple Shipping extension integrates with the Frontend Submissions extension.

Adding shipping to the submission form

To allow Vendors to set their own shipping rates on their products, edit the Submission Form and add the “Shipping” field which can be found under Add Extension Created Fields. When this is in place, vendors who edit products will see two fields: Domestic and International shipping rates.

Basing shipping costs on vendor location

Simple Shipping includes a setting for defining the base country of a digital store. This country will be used to determine whether the International or Domestic rate will apply when customers enter their shipping address during checkout. When using Simple Shipping with Frontend Submissions, typically the vendors will be the one handling the shipping and therefore it is necessary to base the country on the vendor’s location rather than the store owner’s.

To change the shipping calculation to use the Vendor’s location instead of the store’s, a new “Country” field must be added to the Vendor profile form. This field must use the Meta Key “vendor_country” to work correctly. Once this field is in place and a Vendor has set their country, customers purchasing products from the Vendor will have shipping costs added based upon that Vendor’s country instead of the main store’s country.