Suggestion

I just went though a challenging troubleshooting effort and have a suggestion.

My customer's longstanding website suddenly produced a few orders where the customer was never asked for shipping information, despite there being two shipping plugins activated within the store.

It turns out that the store was configured to allow virtual products, though they had none in their inventory. As I understand it, virtual items are solely identified by having no physical weight assigned to them. Our customer's initial inventory contained weight information, even though their shipping methods never required it. However, over the years, they have added items without providing a shipping weight, so on the very rare occasion that someone created a cart with none of the original inventory, the checkout page decided that no shipping information was needed.

I found the configuration override and activated it, and that appears to have solved the problem.

My point is that my customers would NEVER, EVER, EVER have been able to identify this issue. They would have ore-installed the software, restored their inventory, and still not have discovered the problem. I've been working with Hikashop for years, and yet it took me almost a day. Handling virtual items this way may be logical, but it isn't intuitive. Especially since there is no administrative interface interface which can identify or filter these items without inspecting each product's details. I couldn't even identify orders with this issue (a shipping weight of 0) without manually investigating the database (I spotted them because their shipping ID value was 0). By the time the order has been created, it's too late to fix it without contacting the customer.

I recommend adding a visible indicator in the administrative Product list view that identifies any Product Hikashop considers to be a Virtual Item (if Virtual Items are allowed in the store setup). I would prefer to have an actual field which flagged virtual items to provide a search mechanism, but I can imagine someone needing a product definition which contains both a digital download and a shippable item.

I'm glad that you are adding the Order Weight value in a reasonably visible position. That will help identify this issue in the future.

However, identifying the issue still depends upon a very intimate knowledge of how HikaShop functions, and most of our customers - who have been using HikaShop for years, don't have that level of understanding of its internals. As the one who hosts and customizes the store, I have a reasonable chance of putting the pieces together, but our customers are rarely exposed to the initial configuration, or to most of the items you describe which would lead a well-informed operator to a solution, especially now that their sites have been operating for many years - running their inventory has been handed off to new employees several times. There really needs to be some manner of breadcrumb path in the Administrative interface that could lead even a novice user to a solution.

I fully understand the speed and complexity costs of adding a dedicated data field, just as I understand that dynamically identifying Virtual goods could slow the response of any Admin display, which is never a good thing. I also understand the display space limits of an efficient interface -- I fight with those issues in my own customizations.

Perhaps offering a Filtering dropdown to identify Virtual vs Physical Products could be an option in the Products list page. I also suggest changing the label of the Configuration setting from "Force shipping regardless of weight" to something like "Force shipping for virtual/weightless items" and rewriting the Help popup for that switch to make the relationship between weightlessness and virtual more explicit. Just adding a few hints here and there could make a world of difference.

Thanks for your time.