Setting carrier per product

I'm working on a store that has two types of products: perishable food and general merchandise. The food must always be shipped overnight via FedEx, and the other merchandise must always be shipped via USPS. If somebody orders products from both categories, they must be shipped separately.

Do you know of an existing module or configuration settings that would allow for this?

If not, it sounds like a custom module would be the other solution. In this case, what is the best approach? I'm thinking it would be splitting the order into a multi-address shipment, using the same address for both but with different shipping methods. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to do this programatically, so any tutorials/samples/开发者_如何学Goresources would be greatly appreciated.

Probably the sanest way to handle this would be to create two orders per product type, each shipping with a different carrier to the same address. This also IMO makes more sense from a stores tracking perspective as you can handle each independently from each other.

To get you on the right track(since Magento is especially cryptic in this part of itself) you should read the Inchoo programmatically create order in Magento post and by the same author Programatically create customer and order in Magento with full blown one page checkout.

Basically as I see this going is:

1. Get the customer order
2. Itinerate through each product inside the order and split it up in two arrays for each product type
3. Create a separate order for each product type and use the different shipping methods for each.

You will probably have to extend a some controllers OR do it the non-standard way and use helper functions for this, the hard parts will be integrating the payment/shipping modules inside your order process. Going this way will have you creating the full checkout process as the one page checkout Magento provides won't really work and is too much pain to get to work because of the way it uses AJAX.

Also another alternative is to hook in to Magento's pre-create order events and create the orders there using already defined order data split it up in two orders, but this is something I never heard or saw implemented at the moment so you'd have to do it "blindfolded" so to speak.

An easier approach would be to use a custom field that defines your product's shipping method, this way you just add that and don't care about custom orders. You just react with that, however tracking will become mostly impossible IMO.

Over-ride the Free Shipping module.

You can setup a sales rule that applies to certain products and makes them 'Free Shipping', leaving the other products to your chosen main shipment provider.

You will need to see how this works, however, the point is that Magento does have something built in to split an order into two shipping categories, albeit only a sales rule on free shipping. But you have source code...