Great plugin… except for shipping to Canada, UK or alphanumeric postcodes

Great plugin…but I cannot give it a better rate because of three major flaws in the design:

1) It does not understand alphanumeric postcodes which makes it useless if you want to ship based on postcodes in countries such as Canada, UK, Netherlands… (see a complete list below). It is impossible to use postcode or province rates for US based shops planning to ship to Canada, for example.

2) You can only work with states in the country you are shipping from. In other words, if you plan to ship from the US to Canada, you are in trouble: you have to define a single rate for the entire country of Canada, even though most shipping companies would have different prices and types of services for different regions (postcodes/provinces). I believe you will hit the same problem if you want to ship to the UK from Europe, based on destination postcode/county.

3) The interval mechanism used (for example, to define postcodes from 33150-33179) will replace the original string by every single numeric individual postcode in the interval! This is not ideal since the interval may contain hundreds or thousands of individual postcodes. The string limit will be reached and it will make it impossible to use it. For example, the string “33150-35035” will be replaced with “33150; 33151; … 35035”. In other words, it replaces the 11-character string by a 13.200 long string!!! Obviously this will never work! Thank God, they did not try to do the same thing with the wildcards! Imagine the result of “33*” ??

I have found one major bug in the plugin and the team behind it was very fast to fix it. Great work!

My conclusion is that… if you are shipping from any of the countries listed below (or plan to ship to these countries based on postcodes or states/provinces/county), you should not use this plugin because you will not be able to configure it, either because of item 1) or item 2) above.

I consider the fact that the plugin cannot cope with alphanumeric postcodes, a major design overlook. Numbers are nothing more than a special case of alphanumeric values… why not treat postcodes as alphanumeric since this would work for every single country in the world?

Because of this design decision, this plugin cannot be used for postcode shipping to/within the following countries, among others:

Andorra
Argentina
Azerbaijan
Barbados
Bermuda
British Virgin Islands
Brunei
Canada
Cayman Islands
Falkland Islands
Guernsey
Isle of Man
Jersey
Latvia
Lithuania
Malta
Moldova
Netherlands
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Slovenia
Somalia
Swaziland
United Kingdom
Venezuela