Deutsche Post & DHL Shipping Magento 2 Extension Update - part 1
On-Demand Return Shipment Labels
Every now and then, a customer needs to return their order. The ability to create return shipment labels in the admin panel together with the regular shipping label has been a feature of our DHL extensions for a long time. With the current Deutsche Post & DHL Shipping extension, we also introduced the ability to create return shipment labels on demand in the customer account. From then, the merchant no longer had to create a return label for every shipment, just in case the customer will need it. Instead, customers could create a label from the customer account when they had to return something.
The Deutsche Post & DHL Shipping extension integrates with the RMA feature, which enables merchants to create return shipment labels from the admin panel when the customer requests a return. Since the RMA module is only available on Magento Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition), merchants on Magento Open Source (Community Edition) were not able to create return labels on request. This gap is now closed. The extension version 2.2.0 introduces on-demand return shipment labels for everyone.
Merchants on Magento Open Source can now create return shipment labels from the order detail page and access the documents through an additional tab in the navigation sidebar. The new returns grid does not only list the documents created in admin panel, but also those created by the customer in their account.
DHL Europaket
The Deutsche Post & DHL Shipping extension allows booking labels with various shipping products, such as DHL Paket, DHL Merchandise Shipment, or the Deutsche Post mail offerings. The extension version 2.3.0 adds DHL Europaket to the available shipping products for business-to-business parcel shipments within the European Union.
Just like any other shipping product, it will appear as a shipping option on applicable routes when booking a label manually. It can also be set as the default product for automated label creation.
Interactive Mass Action
The Deutsche Post & DHL Shipping extension initially launched with only one shipping product per route. Therefore, booking the correct product during bulk actions did not require any additional configuration. Automation was easy. Extension version 1.1.0 already introduced DHL Merchandise Shipment, followed by the Deutsche Post mail products in version 1.5.0, and DHL Europaket in version 2.3.0. To still support label automation, the merchant has to select a default shipping product in the module configuration.
A major downside of this approach was that all carts were treated alike, although a non-default shipping product may have been a better choice for processing a particular order. A merchant was not able to ship e.g. 60% of orders using DHL Paket, 30% with Merchandise Shipment, and the rest as Deutsche Post mail – unless they processed each and every order manually. Choosing a shipping product per order is now possible with the Interactive Mass Action feature, introduced in extension version 2.3.0.
Once this feature is enabled in the module configuration, the Create Shipments mass action, located at the top of the orders listing, opens an interactive form. For all orders that were selected in the grid, the merchant can now review and change the essential shipping settings, or accept the configured default.
