Drop-shipping Fees

I've mentioned it before, but one area where Volusion does have an advantage over some competitors (and truly the only real reason we've not abandoned Volusion) is because of their ability to calculate shipping costs from more than one warehouse on a single order. However, there is a huge deficiency, and three years of complaining to Volusion hasn't yielded a solution. Of course, if they had anyone in the QA department that actually worked with their users to fulfill the user's needs (rather than focusing on Volusion's need for increased profitability), they would have done something about this deficiency years ago.

Here it is:

Many distributors charge a drop-shipping charge per-shipment. In our case, we have vendors that charge anywhere from $2 to $7.50 per drop-shipped order. The problem is that Volusion doesn't have the ability to add this per-shipment drop-shipping fee per order. There is a simple solution that we have proposed many times, that being the ability to add a per-shipment fee per warehouse.

Volusion has repeatedly denied this request, whether through the old enhancement request system (that entailed multiple entries into the forum to try and get the message properly formatted and past the prying eyes of the administrator, a.k.a., Forum-Nazi Dave), or the seemingly-ignored-yet-somehow "improved" enhancement request system.

Instead, the solution the (on) crack team at Volusion support suggested was to add a fee to each PRODUCT, as shown here:

Well, that's fine and dandy, but creates more problems than it solves. This means that if there is a $5.00 drop-shipping fee required by the vendor (and thus added per product), and a customer orders ten units, the order will have a $50 fee added to the shipping costs. 

Guess what happens to that customer? 

If we're lucky, they leave and probably never come back. If we're unlucky, they flame us on Google Shopping for excessive shipping costs.

So, what I have to do is try to determine the AVERAGE number of items for each particular vendor per order, and adjust the Fixed Shipping Cost per product accordingly.  In other words, if my wild-assed guess is too low, we lose money.  If it is too high, we lose customers.

Thanks, Volusion.