Okay, so I'm new to AbanteCart and probably missing something obvious, but I've been struggling with setting up shipping for about a week now, and all the options seem broken.

My shop is based in the UK, and I'm selling books globally. Customers can order multiple books. Books are heavy and shipping costs money. I want to add the shipping cost on to the order.

I've set up the books as products, and they each have a weight. When I add them to the cart, it shows the correct weight. So far so good. Now all I have to do is calculate the shipping cost.

I'll be sending things via Royal Mail, and there's a Royal Mail shipping extension. Great! Except, this is where the problems begin.

Firstly, the extension uses the term "Airsure" which Royal Mail hasn't used for years now, so that doesn't fill me with confidence. Secondly, the "Airsure" option only has 4 country lists, but Royal Mail has 3 Europe Zones and 3 World Zones, so I need 6 country lists. But it's okay, I can merge some of them together and get 4 international zones in total. Except one of the World Zones is "every other country in the world". Do I really have to enter every single country into the country lists? Isn't there an "all other country option"? Apparently not. In any case, Country List 4 doesn't seem to work at all, so now I only have 3 country lists available.  This could be workable, if Abantecart restricted shipping to those 3 country lists. But instead if the customer selects an unlisted country it doesn't show any shipping at all, and lets them check out!  Free shipping to the most distant countries in the world!  This is the exact opposite of what I want. Come on.

Okay, maybe I'm going about this all wrong. I'm trying to do weight based shipping, and look, there's a shipping extension called "Weight Based Shipping". That looks more promising, right?

Well, straight away there's a setting on the main extension page for maximum weight. Umm... no, the maximum weight depends on which country the parcel is going to.  Like, shipping to Canada is so restrictive that there can basically only be one book per parcel.  So I set the postage/weight combo in the Canada section to "1.5:26.65", and then hope that AbanteCart will only let Canadian customers check out if the total order weight is under 1.5kgs. Except nope! Free shipping for any orders to Canada above 1.5kgs!  Again, this is the OPPOSITE of what I want.

Oh, but AbanteCart helpfully sent me an email with this message:

No shipping method found for the purchase! Parcel size volume: 3380 cubic "cm", Weight: 2.8 "kg". Please check the shipping extension configurations related to the products size volume and weight limits.

Yes, thanks AbanteCart. Why did you let the order complete if the shipping option wasn't available?  Why isn't there a big red warning message at checkout saying "No shipping option available at this weight to this country", or similar, with the payment buttons greyed out? Don't let customers pay if you KNOW there is no shipping method!

Right, so on to the standard things you're going to suggest:

Did you change any PHP?  Nope.
Did you install any other extensions? No.
Have you set "Requires shipping" on all the products?  Yes.
Have you turned off "Free shipping"? Yes, everywhere I can see.
"Flat rate", "Local delivery", etc?  They're all disabled, or not even installed.

I apologise for the ranty tone of this post, but is what I want actually even possible with AbanteCart? I got so frustrated with all this that I installed ZenCart and osCommerce to see if they were any better.  They weren't - actually they were even worse!  So I guess AbanteCart gets some points there and you can feel good about yourselves. But currently I'm still not able to do weight based shipping the way I want.

I'm definitely missing something obvious, right?  How can I disable checkout for weight based shipping where the country/weight combination isn't available? Seems like such a simple and desirable feature. I would appreciate some help here.

Looks like the decision had been made not to release 2.0 as open source according to the Readme in github?

Thanks llegrand,
But that only provides an implied acceptance of terms. I am looking to have a checkbox that the customer has to specifically tick.

I'm setting up AbanteCart V1.3.4 with static pages. Bootstrap5 with same page modal dialogue. I'm only using guest checkout (with fast checkout) as I feel that suits the demographics of my customers.
One last change I need to make is on the final checkout page. To replace the “By clicking Confirm Order, you accept and agree to all terms of.....“ with a checkbox.
Any guidance would be appreciated.

I was trying to work out a way (if there is one) to add a video thumb to the thumbnail section (where small thumb extra images are) to click on so it would play in the enlarged product window. Something like you would see on many sites to view videos of the products for an overall view or to demonstrate how the product works.
Maybe that particular script doesn't support such a choice? I can add a PDF, or image, it has a video choice but anything I try to do doesn't show in the thumbnail image viewer.
Let me know if anyone has an answer. I think it would be a great addition if it doesn't have that option already.