Combine Shipwire storage and order fulfillment and Joomla Virtuemart shopping cart to a complete eCommerce solution!
Shipwire and Virtuemart shopping cart now work together. This integration supports real-time and manual submission of orders from a Virtuemart store to Shipwire and includes our real-time shipping rate connection. Your Shipwire account will then capture the order and route it to the optimal Shipwire warehouse based on your customer’s location. In addition, the Real Time Shipping Rating will quote your customer shipping rates based on the optimal warehouse as well.
IMPORTANT:
This module supports Virtuemart 1.1.9 for Joomla 1.5. The installation of this Shipwire connector requires you to upload some files to your web server. While not difficult to do, we would not necessarily recommend doing this if you are not comfortable working with files on your server. If you are not then we highly recommend finding a web developer that can assist you.
Follow these instructions to add Shipwire warehouse and order fulfillment module to your Virtuemart store:
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Start by logging into your Shipwire account. If you don’t have a Shipwire account please start by setting up a Free Trial account.
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Add the Virtumart sell tool to your Shipwire account to get the Virtuemart module. Go to the “Sell” menu in your Shipwire account and add Virtuemart as a “Sell Tool”. This will automatically add the installation link for the Shipwire Virtuemart Module. Once added you will see a link to your Virtuemart sell tool in the left menu. Click on the Virtuemart sell tool link.
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Click on the Download Store-Sell-Ship™ module link. This will download the Virtuemart installation module for your local hard drive. The next steps detail how to install the Shipwire Module in your Joomla installation on your server.
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Uncompress the .zip file on your local hard drive. Be sure to preserve the directories for the files so they stay organized. You will have two main directories: administrator – This has a series of subdirectories to three files that need to be uploaded into your Joomla server. plugin – Inside this directory is a file shipwire_virtuemart119_plugin.ZIP. This is installed as a plugin to your Joomla server.
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Using FTP or a similar program upload the three files inside the administrator folder into the same directory path as on your hard drive:
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Login to your Joomla installation as an administrator. Go to Extensions – Install / Uninstall
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Choose the shipwire_virtuemart119_plugin.ZIP in the plugin directory. Click Upload File & Install.
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Go to Plugin Manager again and activate the plugin. To help find the plugin filter on the type as System.
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Next activate the Shipwire Plugin. Then click on the link “System – Shipwire” to go to the configuration screen. Enter your Shipwire login email address and password. Unless instructed by Shipwire support do not change the other default values.
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In your Joomla administrative screen go to the Virtuemart Component. Click on Admin – Config. Then select the Shipping tab. Enable the Shipwire Shipping Module. We recommend that if you use the Shipwire Real Time Rating module that you deselect all other shipping types. Click Save:
This completes the installation. You can now set up your Product SKU in Virtuemart. These need match exactly the SKUs in your Shipwire account.
Create a test order on Virtuemart. Upon checkout the order should be in your Shipwire account.
Extra:
Setting up a CRON process
There is a hook for a CRON process that will do several things:
Resubmit orders that could not be immediately sent to Shipwire
Pull down inventory updates
Pull down tracking numbers for orders and have shipped. This will also automatically mark orders as completed.
The easiest way to do this is to setup a CRON process that periodically requests a page from your server with the following URL:
http://(yourdomain.com)/index.php?page=cron
You should not do this more often than once per hour. You can also use JCron plug-in for Joomla to setup a similar process.
