I have built a Virtuemart 3.2.14 store for a client who prefers having flat shipping rates for all products; with separate flat rates for specific items for non-domestic purchases. I've searched and searched for options to do this; until Virtuemart 2, I believe, there was one developer that had created a shipping method that allowed you to create a flat rate based on the SKU, although it never offered the same flat rate settings option for overseas; and they never developed a version for the latest version of Virtuemart.
Creating something by weight is sort of possible, but because different products have different shipping amounts, in order for the total shipping to be cumulative of all the different rates, there would need to be an exponential number of rates created to correspond to the different combinations of added weights; unless there's a way to peg it to equate 1 lbs to $1 of shipping. so that however many pounds total an order was, that would be the value of the shipping, but even then, I don't know if it could be configured separately for countries.
Shopper groups would be another option, but for one thing, my client would prefer to avoid having customers need to register accounts, in large part because of spam, but the main issue with the shopper groups is that they would need to be manually assigned to an account, at least to my understanding they do; and we'd want customers to be able to go straight to purchase after registration (were they required to register). If their registration could somehow add them automatically to a shopper based on their shipping address, that may be the closest possible solution.
The last option so far has been to use the Tax Rate and Rules configuration to creating rates that apply tax per product, add a price value instead of adding a percentage, but even that I can't get to work correctly for different countries; and I would prefer a solution that maintains the tax settings only for applying tax rates.
Am I overlooking another option? Is this just that uncommon a thing? I've seen others inquire about flat rate shipping over the years, but never much in the way of solutions.
I have a component I built a couple of years ago for sku shipping
I just tried installing on VM3.2.14 and seems to work fine although it doesn't have per country sku rates ...
It could be extended .. depends what your wanting to invest in it...
PM me and I can show you a test site with it