Anyone shipping long products? If you are you must be truly frustrated with CS-Carts handling of package size.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]
I propose that CS-Cart fix Box Size and Min/Max packing so it actually works.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]
What I would like to see is that:
If different products have the same box size:
a) They will be calculated as shipping together (not separately as it is currently done)
The cart should compare the Min/Max items per box and use the lowest Max items per box for figure # of boxes for a rate quote.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]
If you are selling long items. You probably have tried the options given already. None of them work. Either the customer or seller gets the shaft depending on how you set it up.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]
We sell products up to 105" length (max package length 108") UPS rates go crazy if the girth of the box gets too large so it is often cheaper to ship multiple box than one overly large box.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]
This upgrade to the shipping feature would trigger multiple box shipping that is affordable.
Cast you vote so something gets fixed so at least someone can use the features that seem to be useless right now. This may not be the best fix but seems like it would serve many people using the cart.[/font][/color]
[quote][color=“#292c33”]We sell products up to 105" length (max package length 108") UPS rates go crazy if the girth of the box gets too large [/color][/quote]
For your individual items which would be considered “Oversized”, it should be a very easy fix to have accurate realtime shipping rates returned by simply increasing the product rate on these items until the correct rate is being returned to your customers. For example, if your Item XYZ has an actual weight of 15 Lbs, then you may need to enter the weight for this product as 25 Lbs to reflect the UPS Oversized charge.
As far as multiple cart items being calculated as spread out into multiple boxs with a maximum weight per carton, we do this every day, all day long with amazingly accurate rates.
Thanks for the response. There are several work arounds. I have looked at many of them and have come up with what seems to work for us. We are working on using setting up Multiple UPS shipping options and naming them slightly differently with a “-” which are tied to “suppliers” and are then limited to specific ship shipping criteria in shipping “methods”.
UPS-Ground for Long Items
UPS Ground for Regular Items
UPS-Ground Has the package sizes is set in Shipping Methods to 108" x 5" x 6"
UPS Ground Has the Package sizes is set in Shipping Methods to 12" x 12" x 12" (This is set to kind of a large size for somewhat obvious reasons. Have to have a larger size so Expedited rates are accurate or on the high side.)
The long products are tagged to specific supplies (which we actually renamed to be used as an Availability Field"
This way the long products are all coming from the supplier that uses the UPS-Ground Rates
UPS-Ground has Weight Dependencies Triggered to % base calculations doubling the shipping cost based on the package weights.
The pain here is that you need to normalize all your long product weights so they trigger the appropriate quantity to get the proper weight to trigger a second or third package.
This method actually works well butttt with lots of different long products and packing capabilities you have to take the time to normalize all the weights properly or it won't work.
The point of the post really wasn't about a work around. It really was about getting something useful out of a feature that is for most a useless feature. The use of Box Dims and Min Max qty is pretty much useless for most of the products. It seems to be truly only useful for products that have to ship separately 1 per box.
It is a lot of work for something that should be fairly simple.
Just a quick thought/reply, however, in our situation I have found that it is often best to “not” enter specific carton sizes as it often becomes a bottleneck. We typically control the maximum weight per carton at the “shipping method level” and disregard individual product package size dims other than for a few unique products which we do need to calculate as being shipped seperately. We are then able to make adjustments to individual product weights to overcome any rate tweaks we might need.
Thanks - think I have it under control. We're setting sizes only for the long package items in their “own” shipping methods. The only products (very few) that have a size associated with them set the “product details” are the ones that truly ship separately.
The cart should compare the Min/Max items per box and use the lowest Max items per box for figure # of boxes for a rate quote.[/font][/color][color=#292C33][font=Arial, sans-serif]