AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I have a client who wanted me to ask this- I haven't had time to research it.

I've noticed that the shipping charges get fairly high (compared to my actual postage costs) when a customer orders multiple items. On the product pages, I enter the weight value in pounds at the estimated total 'packaged' weight of a single item. This works fine if they only order one item and covers the shipping costs. However, when they order several items, it seems as if the program adds the boxed weight for each item, which is then used to calculate shipping charges. It would be nice if I could specify an 'incremental weight' (actual weight excluding packaging) of an item, so that the shipping costs could be calculated more accurately. It would consider the boxed weight of the first item and then add in the incremental weights for the remaining items. In other words, if someone orders four plastic vases in one box, it should figure the shipping charges of the four vases in one box, rather than adding 4x the weight of a single item in a box.

Dimensional shipment rating is a difficult challenge.

The first (and most difficult) requirement is the business have an exact standard for shipment packaging materials. A certain number of boxes, each having very specific sizes. Add on to it the "mix restrictions" i.e. you don't want to ship bricks in the same box you ship china. Usually each product is given a "packaging class"; items from different classes cannot be packaged together.

Every item they sell then has to be dimensionally measured - in other words, how much cubic space does the item occupy including any protective wrap like bubble-pack, foam etc. All that has to be fed into the catalog product records.

The shipping calculator routines then get heavily modified to "summarize" the order. All the cubic dimensions are tallied and, along with the packaging class taken into consideration, the programming mathematically "fits" each item into the dimensions of the shipping materials available.

After all that's done, you can then send the packaging dimensions/weights to the freight carrier for rate calculation.

It's a huge modification to do it right. Can you tell I worked on a similar project years ago

I was wondering if there was a way to have separate boxing calculation per shipping method.
If shipping ground, its best to keep all packages less then 5,184 cubic inches. So using multiple boxes instead of one big box can make cheaper shipping.
But for UPS Air you get charged for size starting at a vary small size if you have light boxes. Its cheeper to send Air packages in 1 big box.

USPS has a max size different the Fedex or UPS, so it cant ever use the Big box.

For UPS

* For UPS Ground Shipments: If the cubic size of the package is 5,184 or larger, divide the cubic size by 194 to determine dimensional weight in pounds. If the cubic size is less than 5,184, use the actual weight of the package.
* For UPS Air Shipments: Divide the cubic size by 194 to determine dimensional weight in pounds. Any fraction of a pound will be calculated at the next highest rate.

http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resour ... nal+Weight


For USPS

Parcels addressed for delivery to zones 5-8 that exceed 1 cubic foot (1,728 cubic inches) are charged based on the actual weight or the dimensional weight, whichever is greater.

Find your zones
http://postcalc.usps.gov/ZoneCharts/Default.aspx