Miva Merchant allows you to create things called “Shipping Method Rules” which help you control which shipping methods are available to your customers at checkout. To manage your shipping method rules, you want to be in the Shipping Method Rules tab inside of the Shipping Settings area of the Miva Merchant Admin. Although there are a number of ways you can configure a shipping method rule, they mainly affect shipping methods in three general ways; Sorting, Restrictions and Exclusions.
Let's talk about Sorting your shipping methods first and for that we're going to be looking at Priority. At the moment all of these shipping methods have the same level of priority, so they will take on their default sorting. But let's say you want “Next Day Air” to appear on the top of the shipping options list. We just need to double click on “Next Day Air” and make sure it's priority is greater than all of the other options. With a priority of 1, it's greater than all of the other 0 priority options and it rises to the top of the list. If we view the checkout pages that the customer sees, here we can see “UPS Next Day Air” is second in the list, but when we click refresh it's now moved up to the top of the list. The same thing goes with “UPS Ground.” If we want to bring it up to the top of the list, we can edit it and assign the higher priority, such as 100 and when we go back to the store page, we can see that it now appears above all of the other shipping options.
Moving on let's have a look at Restrictions. When you configure a restriction, that shipping method will not appear as an option to your customers unless that restriction scenario is met. We can restrict by the order total, the item quantity in the basket, or by the total weight of the basket. We can also configure geographic restrictions such as restrict by state, restrict by country, or restrict by ZIP code. So for instance, if I select restrict by state and click on Alaska and also Arizona and Colorado by holding down my control key “UPS Ground” will not be a shipping option available to the customer unless the customer is in Alaska, Arizona or Colorado. Since I'm placing this order from California, if I hit refresh, Ground Shipping is no longer a valid option for this order.
Lastly, let's have a look at Exclusions. Exclusions allow you to omit certain shipping options from the list if another shipping option is available to the customer. By default these are all set to “Allow,” but you can configure them to either exclude another shipping option or be excluded by another shipping option. So first I'll narrow down this shipping options availability with a restriction of some sort. So now only orders between 0 to $7 will be able to trigger this Price Table Based shipping option. Down here I want to say if this Price Table Based shipping option is available to the customer, then we want to exclude UPS Next Day Air as well as Second Day Air and Next Day Air Saver. When we go back to the example order, because the shopping cart subtotal is $7, it will trigger the Price Based shipping option and because the Price Based shipping option is available, it will omit Next Day Air, Second day Air and Next Day Air Saver. Exploring this further, if we go back and modify the shopping basket so that the subtotal is greater than $7, when we go back to the checkout pages, Price Based is no longer available to the customer making my air shipping options available to the customer once more.