Shipping
The Shipment Module has been released with Vanilo v3.0.
Overview
The shipment module was designed to support the parcel delivery needs of E-commerce businesses.
In the transportation planning jargon, this is also commonly referred to as Last mile transportation.
Albeit many shops, especially those with high shipping volumes need to deal with Freight forwarding, this module was not intended to support that part of the supply chain, but it can serve as a data source for such operations.
Shippables
The shipment module handles payments for arbitrary Eloquent models like orders or individual products, etc. commonly referred to as "shippables".
Shippable is an interface defined in the vanilo/contracts package.
Any Eloquent model can implement this interface.
Carriers
The Carrier model is stored in the carriers table and typically represents
a company that performs parcel delivery services, like DHL, UPS or local Post.
These carriers are also commonly referred to as "last mile carriers".
Apart from that, if the shops delivers itself, it can also be listed as a carrier.
Carriers have an is_active flag which is true by default.
use Vanilo\Shipment\Models\Carrier;
$dhlNl = Carrier::create(['name' => 'DHL Netherlands'])->fresh();
$dhlNl->is_active;
// true
Carrier objects have a configuration array which might be necessary for storing credentials, service level, or any other carrier related configuration.
$postNord = Carrier::create(['name' => 'Post Nord']);
$postNord->configuration = ['apikey' => '91f146137449a4068b3523a80xxx4f30'];
$postNord->save();
Carriers however, are not equal to shipping methods, which are the combinations of a carrier, pricing and other configurations.
Shipments
Shipments in the system are separate entities and are stored in the shipments table.
Each record/entity represents a single parcel. This can be a single item or a set of
items that is being delivered at once or handled as a single unit
(eg. identified by a tracking number) by the shipping carrier.
If the delivery of an order is split into multiple shipments, then each shipment will have a new entry in the database.
TO BE FINALIZED BY 9th March, 2022
