Hi all,
I'm working on a store that involves serving up custom shipping rates generated through the Carrier Service API during checkout. I now understand from this olde threade - http://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussion/t/carrier-calculated-shipping-rates-16308 - that all items must have a weight for the carrier service to be queried to provide a quote. No big deal - we calculate rates by price rather than weight, but now all items have been assigned a peppercorn weight so that the carrier service quote generator is queried to provide a rate during checkout to avoid the dreaded "Unfortunately there is no Shipping Rate available for your destination and/or weight of your cart." So far so good, but...
...Randomly the checkout process fails to use the carrier service quote generator for certain specific items, even when they have weight specified. I've tried increasing their weights (up to 10kg) to eliminate the possibility that that might remain the problem. I also see that the thread above is flagged as "outdated". Is there any more recent information on the use of third-party carrier service quotes during checkout? Is there any other attribute other than item weight that will flag the checkout not to use the carrier services? Any help at all would be appreciated.