Hello:
 
I wonder if anyone can shed some light on some shipping issues I have:
 
I have many different styles of products, some will fit in a single envelope, some in a small box, some in a large box and some may take 5 boxes or more. The customer may also purchase several different items (of course like you guys, the more they buy the better for all of us) which may require a combination of different sizes of boxes and weights.
 
How do you deal with this? I would really appreciate it if you could comment on how your shop handles shipping? Please does not matter how simple your shipping is, just shed some light so I understand this whole procedure. Right now I am trying to get a handle on the shipping and the way it all works.
Thanks.

Hi Riyaz,
 
I too ship various sizes and to multiple countries .. I just set up my shipping as a simple add on price then I set a free shipping based on amount spent. I can usually cover the cost into increased sales.
 
Funny thing was today I was setting up my packing slips and a feature that would be good, possibly can already is a combined
packing label invoice print setup. Could fiddle about with html just wondering if anyone else has done this already.
 
Colin

Clarify - you can buy blank sheet with a pull off sticky label where you print the buyers address etc.. would be handy methinks.

Shipping can be complicated if you have boxy items that have a density of 167kg/m3 or 11lb/ft3(in North America). Here's what we do:
 
1) check density of each item listed, if it's less than the carrier's cube dimensions, then gross up the weight in your product table to match the cube.
L x W x H / 6000 = cubic mass for cm & kgs)
L x W x H / 157 = cubic mass for in. and lbs
 
2) Limit all mail services to 20kgs, this will keep you from getting oversized or multi piece surcharges.
 
3) For items that can ship with a stamp a very small $amount, consider bundling shipping cost into the product and selling the item with shipping included.
 
4) If you have multi peics shipments to the same client, make sure you have a carrier that works multipeice! Mail is usually cost prohibitive for these types of deliveries.

This is cross posted from another thread....
 
Perhaps Viart would look at adding a markup/discount percentage off real time rates. Most carriers return real time servers return published rates, they expect the e-commerce softweare to apply discounts and upcharges for handling. For a 10 lbs package shipped from Toronto, VIART returns the UPS shipping costs as shown below (our actual UPS costs with our discount applied are in brackets)
 
Local $11.91 ($5.49)
California, US $34.64 ($15.60)
London, UK $211.38 ($81.00)
 
As you can see there is a huge difference between published rates and net rates, so presenting only published rates will scare clients away. This makes the real tilme rate module unusable for most stores.
 
The good news is you can program your own own rate table into Viart. Caution: it's a lot of work, the feint of heart need no read on!
 
1) Using your shipper's zone guide, determine which zones you will be shipping to. For each of these zones you will create a unique "shipping module".
2) Next, withing each "shipping module" create a "shipping type" and define the country and states for that zone.
3) For each "Shipping Type", calculate your base rate (1lb rate) for that zone using your shipping contract. Compute any discounts/markups then enter this into the "Shipping Type -> Shipping Cost -> Per Order" field. Then determine the incremental cost for every lb from the rate table and enter that into the "Shipping Type -> Shipping Cost -> Per Weight" field.
 
Do this for every zone and you'll have a full zone-shipping implementation!

This is good. Thanks.
Colin, what do you mean by setting up shipping as a "simple add on price"?
 
And how do you stop the ViArt software from obtaining shipping costs, and putting our own amount in the shipping?
 
I must sound a little slow here but please bear with me.