AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

We just starting selling a product. One item has the option of 9 different colors and lengths from 3' up to 8' long (9 different lengths). That is 81 different items. I don't want to enter 81 different products. I was hoping to only have one product with to drop down boxes for the customer to choose from. But how do I get UPS to figure out shipping because of the different size of boxes. The 8 foot long box will cost more to ship than the 3 foot long box??

Thanks in advance for your insight.

It is kind of a mute point as the software (able) does not take length into consideration when calculating freight anyways.

Hello,

Actually Tim If you have items marked as ships separately then the dimensions are passed in, but that doesn't help on the 81 different items. However you could add a bit into the price of the longer items to cover the shipping on average.

You could also add some weight to the longer variants. That way the customer sees the same price, but the shipping charge will be more. We have had to do that in the past when UPS changed dimensional charges to charge more for a smaller box.

Shopping Cart Admin wrote:Hello,

Actually Tim If you have items marked as ships separately then the dimensions are passed in, but that doesn't help on the 81 different items. However you could add a bit into the price of the longer items to cover the shipping on average.

This would be a lot more useable if the system took the longest item on the order and used that to calculate available shipping methods. We currently cannot offer small box rates as people would select that when the items need a much larger box.

@surf.. I think your best bet would be to sell 9 different products (one for each length) with a variant for the colors. For the lengths you know will be oversized you could say they have to ship separatly and then the calculation should be done as Mike said.

If you have 9 different products and have the same description it won't be good for the search engines. I know this from experience. But that would be the easiest to handle the freight issue for dimensional weight. I like Able because of the multiple warehouses. I haven't seen any other shopping program better. I recently setup a store that runs on nopcommerce. The program doesn't have multiple warehouse capabilities but when you setup a product you enter the dimensions for each variant. I wish Able was done like this but with all of the people using it there is no way they could change it.