Flatrate methods have been serving me well to provide for Royal Mail shipping rates, but as we add more international rates and other providers (for example Parcelforce), the administration is getting to be a bit complex. If I am missing something, please feel free to correct me!

It seems overly complicated to have to add individual rates rate by rate as follows:

1) Royal Mail Blah:
Country = UK
All products
weight > 1kg
weight <= 2kg

2) Royal Mail Blah:
Country = UK
All products
weight > 2kg
weight <= 3kg

and then if rate 1.25-15kg is required have to go in and edit both of the above rates, then create a new one...

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I would like to be able to configure so that filter works as follows:

Is this a UK order (most of ours are):
if yes: calculate rate based on table of max weight | price
(min of each weight band created from max of previous band or 0 if none)
else : look at other tables (probably tagged with groups of countries eg list of European countries)

The administration of this could take the form of a two column table display with an 'insert weight band' link and maybe a minimum price field.

One day I would also like to be able to import a csv file to update all rates for a specific filter at once (looking at Migrate and Table Wizard for interim solution example) ...

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Table Quote module

I have been searching and have found the Table Quote module. This seems to work pretty closely to what I'm after but without support for seperate filters per shipping country etc - although a pending patch offers some hope on this aspect?

basically, I'm interested in anyone's views and opinions as to how best to create and administer shipping rates based for multiple shipping rates based on weight bands.