The shipping costs are one of the most important factors in the conversion rate of your store. If the customer is able to asses the cost of the shipping before the cart he will be more likely to add as much as he feels is not a problem for his budget. The shipping costs should be displayed directly below the price. We also advise that your price area is very clean and you display all the costs and taxes very clear before your client clicks the cart link. Else he might feel cheated and it you will lose him in the checkout step.We developed the "Product Page Shipping Quote" for one of our clients. It was a more customized version but after some work and modifications we ware able to adapt the module for the default Magento theme and system so it can be published on Mageto Connect. The extension is very simple. It generates a shopping cart and adds the shipping address with your details to the quote together with the weight of the product from the page you are on. The output is sent back to the window by ajax. We preferred the ajax way because we did not want to generate the quote unless the user asks so we cut down on resource utilization. Before you can use the "Product Page Shipping Quote" extension you need to go to the System->Configuration->EaDesign and enable the extension. If you use other packages (themes) besides the base/default or rwd/default you need to move the files in the package you use. The extension files that you will add to your template are: app/design/frontend/base/default/layout/eadesigndev/shipestimation.xmlapp/design/frontend/base/default/template/eadesigndev/shipestimation/shipestimation.phtmlapp/design/frontend/base/default/template/eadesigndev/shipestimation/catalog/product/view/estimate.phtmlWe are thinking to develop a PRO version for this extension to include region detection so most of the users would not have to fill the fields for the country, city and zip. Also this version would load more details with a on load event and delay to get the data after the other parts of the page are loaded. Also the details for the city/region used for the estimation would need to be shown to avoid confusion.We really hope the current version will help the community and maybe even you to increase your conversion rate. If you thing our pro version is worth developing give us a message or comment.Good luck!
