Most online shops send out physical products. The ways this can be handled are manifold, and the logistics chain encompasses many business processes. This chapter will give a brief introduction to those and after that we will discuss how you can set up shipping methods inside Magento. Finally some possible additions to Magento's default shipping functionalities will be discussed.
Magento Community Edition supports part of the logistics processes that occur in online stores. Put simply, logistics is everything related to moving the goods within your business from one place to the next. This entails stocking your inventory, picking your products from stock when an order arrives, packing your goods for sending, and finally shipping the order to your customer. One important aspect of this is that your customers should pay you the correct amount for shipping to their doorstep. In order to arrange that Magento has some default shipping calculations included. In this chapter the following will be discussed:
- At a general level, what kind of actions and processes are involved in e-commerce logistics
- Setting Magento's default shipping methods and what you can do if those do not suffice
- Why some aspects of logistics are not fully supported by Magento and what you can do if you need more logistics functionality in your Magento installation