Shipping addresses / types linked to line items as opposed to carts / orders

[rob-c-baker]

We have a case where a particular product can only be delivered to a specific country but many other products that can be delivered almost anywhere.

We have this set-up with shipping rules but have an issue where-by if a user adds both country restricted products and non restricted products to their cart and then tries to checkout, the shipping stage of the checkout can refuse to progress, as no valid shipping types can be selected that are valid for the user's address (depending what country the address is in of course).

This is a new requirement for our shop but we are likely to have more products of this country restricted type so I am just about to develop something to spot this and offer options to to the user before they get half way through the checkout. This will probably involve something like a warning explaining the situation with an option to remove the product that is preventing a shipping option being available.

This got me thinking though: our specific issue is with different delivery countries but it could apply to any difference in address (i.e. state, region, zip / post code, etc), a nice way to solve this might be to offer the user to deliver some of their order to a different address, which would require the ability to tie an (delivery or otherwise) address and therefore a shipping type too not just to a cart / order but to a line item.

Another option might be to actually do multiple simultaneous orders behind the scenes somehow - some kind of split order function.

P.S. I can see a lot of value in being able to set different shipping types on different line items for an order, regardless of address, aside from the issue of addresses.