Shipping Improvements

[kastnerd]

I believe there is quite a good number of bugs / Feature Requests regarding shipping. What is the current road map for Able and its future releases?

Looking at the UPS logs it looks like Able passes weight and dimensional weight to UPS.

My troubles are a single item that is 2 wheels, If shipped Ground its 2 boxes, and dimensional dose not effect this. But if shipped Air dimension of the box is a big factor, And to the cheapest shipping its better to put both wheels in 1 box for air shipment, But for ground if you put both in this larger box you get charged for over sized ground package.

Now here is where things get tricky, Ground and domestic air shipments use a 194 dim, Standard International dim is 166, But UPS give me a 265 dim and FedEx gives us a 240 dim.

So for a single item there is 4 different weight / dim weights.

And able dose not use dim weight if you order more then a single item.

What is the best way to improve shipping quotes? And is able or another developer looking to offer this?

[MartinZ]

We are running into a similar situation that is now critical. We have one product that is 34 lbs and 22"x22"x30". We have a special box for this and each is individually packaged. Since it is below the 150lb max that UPS offers, AbleCommerce calculates shipping accurately for 1 item, but doesn't increase the shipping cost when set to 2 items. We believe it is caused by the same issue reported above where only weight is submitted for multi-item purchases. This rules out using the correct dimensions/weight for the store under these circumstances and means our store is in Catalog mode until further notice. This is not good!!! Please look into this and find a workable solution. Thanks...

BTW, we have a 7.0.0 production system with a 7.0.3 staging system we are working on. The behavior appears to be the same in both versions.

[mtran]

When I look at the UPS log, it seems like ableCommerce doesn't know how to calculate the total dim for different items of different sizes. As a result, it always sends the weight only without the dim in the UPS xml. This is incorrect. If anyone knows a work around, please let us know. Thanks!

[kastnerd]

We are running into a similar situation that is now critical. We have one product that is 34 lbs and 22"x22"x30". We have a special box for this and each is individually packaged. Since it is below the 150lb max that UPS offers, AbleCommerce calculates shipping accurately for 1 item, but doesn't increase the shipping cost when set to 2 items. We believe it is caused by the same issue reported above where only weight is submitted for multi-item purchases. This rules out using the correct dimensions/weight for the store under these circumstances and means our store is in Catalog mode until further notice. This is not good!!! Please look into this and find a workable solution. Thanks...

BTW, we have a 7.0.0 production system with a 7.0.3 staging system we are working on. The behavior appears to be the same in both versions.

Able is very limited when it comes to shipping. If you change the weight of the item to 75lbs it should work better, In able its basically pointless to put any dimensions in.

[MartinZ]

Yes, we had done that already. We also played with 75.1 lbs in hopes that AC would be smart enough to break the packages into multiple shipments. It works fine as long as the customer only orders 1 item. Unfortunately, this also skewed the actual shipping charges. And it doesn't make sense to adjust a 3 lb item into a 75 lb item just to get shipping to work "normally". When adding more items to the cart, we started seeing the shipping costs go down and then fluctuate randomly. Since this isn't acceptable, we opted to calculate shipping after an order has been placed. This is a temporary workaround while we build a better Shipment method in AC. We're still open to ideas!

[kastnerd]

Yes, we had done that already. We also played with 75.1 lbs in hopes that AC would be smart enough to break the packages into multiple shipments. It works fine as long as the customer only orders 1 item. Unfortunately, this also skewed the actual shipping charges. And it doesn't make sense to adjust a 3 lb item into a 75 lb item just to get shipping to work "normally". When adding more items to the cart, we started seeing the shipping costs go down and then fluctuate randomly. Since this isn't acceptable, we opted to calculate shipping after an order has been placed. This is a temporary workaround while we build a better Shipment method in AC. We're still open to ideas!

Agreed this is not the best way to do things if offering different shipping methods on the same product. Shipping fails when users have more then 1 item in the cart.