The most important thing to get right when setting up shipping for any e-commerce store is planning. The main considerations should be what makes sense to your customers, accuracy of the charge, and simplicity. That is, the best configuration for an e-commerce shipping setup is the simplest one that charges the right amount in a way your customers understand.
Having said that, some setups will be necessarily complex. What about the zip code scenario in the previous recipe? Now consider if the charge should change by weight as well? We can quite simply configure multiple shipping options per zip range that take into account a different weight range each. There comes a point, as mentioned twice already, where a custom shipping plug-in will be the best solution. But buying a plugin is not always the best solution and this recipe will configure a somewhat complex setup with the standard VirtueMart shipping options.
The aim of the recipe is to configure...