How to stop users from shipping particular products to a particular state/country?

[Jesse]

So we have some products that are being banned for import to Canada, and other products that may be banned for sale to particular states.

We would like to be able to be able to prevent the completion of a checkout or order if a customer is ordering one of these products (flagged via a custom field) to particular states or countries.

Specific use case: Canada is banning the import of single use plastics, and we don't want Canadian customers to be able to complete checkouts if they have "single use plastics" in their cart.

However, I can see the "plastic" case happening to particular states - and even further out, some products made with certain chemicals could be banned for sale to particular states.

We allow guest checkout, so I believe we need to evaluate the products after the 'Shipping' page (as we can't block 'add to cart' if we don't know destination).

Currently - I know we can inform the customer by having warning notes or images appear on product pages and basket items based on a custom field - but that's not 100% reliable.

We can catch such violations after the order is placed - but trying to contact, explain, alter charges, offer substitutes etc. is not great customer experience.

• So is there any native Miva functionality that can prevent ordering particular products to particular destinations?
• Is there an existing app/module that can accomplish this?
• Or is this best served by custom development?

(I've read some other forum posts related to the topic, but they seemed old.)

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I think the best approach is to use custom fields to set exclusion notes and then use a bit of SMT coding to alert customers and prevent ordering. For example, you might have custom product fields like:

Country Exclusions
State Exclusions

and using your example,

for Country Exclusions: CA
for State Exclusions: CA (cause we all know you're talking about california :)

Then, on something like Choose Shipping/Payment page (cause we need to know Country and State) you run through the basket contents and test each product. If that product as an exclusion you compare it too their information and display a message. (Actually best to take them back to Basket and display the message--but that does take a bit more work)

[lesliekirk]

Shipping Method Rules can be set to "Restrict to These States" (backwards from what you need). The Shipping Method Rules also allow you to "Exclude This Method Unless Permitted by Products". So you could create a Shipping Method for these products, set the states that can receive the product, set the "exclude" and then go to the Product Shipping Rules, set the Limit Shipping Methods and select the Permitted Shipping Method. You'll need to test and play around with this a bit to make sure it behaves the way you need it to. Also, do create a Product Custom Field for a message/warning advising the customer of the restricted shipping for the product.

And yes, the current method is backwards but without knowing advance where the product would be going to, it is hard to block at the add to cart when checking out as a guest.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I thought about mentioning shipping rules, but honestly, in my experiance (esp with several shipping methods) it gets overly complex. Plus, you have to bail on using "No Shipping Rules found" stop gap feature.

Also (and maybe i was asleep in class that day) i'm not aware of the ability to display a message based on shipping rules being excluded on a product basis without doing what i outlined (hint, hint miva--might be a nice feature to have a "Explain Why" field in shipping rules. For example, if a Shipping Rule is excluded by configured options, provide a message in a variable that can be displayed.)

[Kent Multer]

I have a small utility module that can do this without changing any shipping rules. You can PM or email me for details.