"visitor" Group & Shipping Carrier Problem

[artofadornment]

I'm running a test shop to make sure everything works before I go public, and encountered another problem (if you've seen my other posts, you'll know I'm having several and I'm getting close now to scrapping PrestaShop altogether). This one doesn't matter whether I use 1-page checkout or not.

 

If you can set up carriers to be accessible to groups, can you set a carrier accessible to only *one* group? For example, "visitors" only? It seems to me this should be the case, but for some reason for me it's not (don't know if there's a glitch, I'm missing something, or it just isn't possible).

 

Well, I'd like to display a carrier to visitors only. It bothers me that shipping rates appear to people who aren't logged in, so not knowing how to turn off what seems to be an automatic geolocator or something that's grabbing rates, I thought I'd try to get rid of any rates showing to visitors the hard way. First, I tried removing "visitor" from the groups in my existing carriers. That did nothing, which I found rather annoying.

 

So then I thought I'd create a new carrier for visitors only, set it to free shipping, and then change the translation for "free shipping!" to "sign up or log in" (sneaky, no?). Like the other carriers I made before it, I selected only one group, this time just "visitor". That also did nothing. Although interestingly, when I went back and selected the "customers" group for it as well, it appeared. *sigh*

 

Since that was obviously the wrong approach, I thought I'd go into the groups themselves and disable anything that would prevent visitors from seeing rates whatsoever. I went to Customers > Groups > Vistors and unauthorized all the shipping related stuff I could find. And you guessed it, this also did nothing.

 

I am at a loss. You know, having rates show to visitors wouldn't be so bad if the Shipping Estimation module actually worked properly. If it did, I'd re-enable it and be happy. As it is, it only show rates to visitors when they use an address in my default country (Canada), otherwise it just sits there trying to load and never does.

 

Any advice you can offer is greatly appreciated!