We love WordPress as a CMS platform. It’s a very cost effective way for people to get their own basic content managed website online and one of the few ‘out of the box’ solutions we recommend to clients.

One of the great things about WordPress is the vast array of plugins available to turn a basic install into a far more specialised website. One such plugin is ‘WP e-Commerce‘ which is a great little shop plugin for WordPress, adding a basic online shop facility to a WordPress blog.

So that’s the background information out of the way, now onto the reason for this blog post…

Our client LouLouChic (a lovely online lifestyle boutique) use WP e-Commerce to power their shop. They have a standard delivery price for all items in the shop, which is charged on a per delivery basis. So you can order 5 items and just be charged the standard flat rate delivery on your order. However some items are rather large/heavy or just more expensive to post, therefore an additional supplementary postage charge is required for these specific items. Thankfully WP e-Commerce had enough flexibility within its delivery settings to allow for this level of customisation to the shopping cart.

However we couldn’t understand why this additional item supplement wasn’t being carried through to the checkout, once the customer proceeded to Paypal. Initially we thought this was a bug with WP e-Commerce, but after some investigation, it turned out that Paypal had a setting hidden in the Postage Calculations page (accessible via the Profile menu option) in the clients Paypal account, which needed to be enabled.

So if you have the same problem just check the box ‘Click here to allow transaction-based postage values to override the profile postage settings listed above (if profile settings are enabled).’ and hopefully it should all work as intended.