Volumetric weight calculation
Printed From: RomanCart.com Forum
Category: RomanCart
Forum Name: Suggestions and Improvements
Forum Description: If you think RomanCart needs to do something extra say it here!
URL: http://forums.romancart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=13467
Printed Date: 01 October 2023 at 11:59pm
Topic: Volumetric weight calculation
Posted By: rscass
Subject: Volumetric weight calculation
Date Posted: 19 May 2016 at 4:19pm
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It was once suggested to me by one of the support staff that I really should be using volumetric weights for shipping. It's a good idea, and would allow me to extend our range of shipping destinations for our bulkier items. At present, I set a ridiculously high weight for items which I know will be penalised by virtue of the volume. Could an option for inputting a volume be added to each product, together with a checkbox to 'Use volumetric shipping weight'. I'm suggesting an opt-in style option because it's a major exercise to start altering all of the shipping weights in product manager in one go. I imagine for most sellers that there would be a period of transition. Richard. |
Replies:
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 8:07am
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It's carton size, that sets the Volumetric weight, not the contents. it's the logic of an expected density - airlines make no money on people sending large , but light boxes by airfreight. I would like to be able to have a "use volumetric weight" option at when looking up the weight table entry for the selected delivery country. This is an old post - but it's still relevant. Dave ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: Support
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 8:46am
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Hi, The issue here is that the system cannot know the carton size which is going to be used to ship the items as this depends on how they are packed. However things you can do are: Override the weight on each country - therefore you can change the weight for items by delivery location. Override the shipping cost. If you sell small items and huge items then you would enter say £1 shipping override for the small items and for example £10 for the large items. The system sets the shipping cost to the largest override value. Many Thanks Support |
Posted By: rscass
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 11:53am
Thank you for your speedy reply  My original request in May 2016 followed a call to support. I was looking for ways to make the cart distinguish between a 75g large letter and a 75g parcel. The helpful (and correct) suggestion from Romancart Support was that I "should be using volumetric weight calculations". It CAN be done simply by assigning a volumetric weight (LxWxDxWeight) to each individual product, then altering the weight based shipping tables to reflect these new, much bigger, numbers. At the time, altering shipping methods for 350 products all in one go would have presented quite a challenge, especially since I only had about 10 products which would have gone in a Jiffy Bag. I abandoned the idea, but following a change of business plan and a massive cull of products, I'm going to give it a go. Setting price overrides for each product for each shipping method sounds to me like significantly more work. |
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 1:02pm
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Hi, doesn't that mean a table for each country though ? I only have UK, EU, Europe (non EU), and rest of the World. It's the rest of the world that would be a bit labourious to set up on a per country basis, surely regards Dave ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: rscass
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 1:21pm
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Hi Dave, I think it's only as complicated as you want to make it. When I set weight bands within Romancart weight based shipping feature, I lay everything out in notepad first, alter prices as necessary and paste them into Romancart as a list. I will set mine up as follows: Weight based shipping. Each weight band will be volumetric, with a price against each line. Say, up to 10kg volumetric, £5, up to 20kg £10 and so on. For this example, you would write a list as follows: 0,10000,5 10001,30000,10 30001,40000,15 40001,50000,20 50001,999999999999999999,10000 (this final line makes the customer have a heart attack then phone you for a quote when the cart wants to charge £10000 shipping. If you don't cover all possible maximum parcel weights, the customer will be offered free shipping on say 500 of your 1kg widgets if you don't have a 500kg price). etc etc. For courier based deliveries, I would (without looking) probably end up with 5 or 6 zones, each allocated to specific European countries. Once I've decided what weight bands to use, I just need to tweak the prices for each zone and copy and paste the lists into Romancart. Once one is done, it wouldn't take too long to duplicate them. How many shipping methods you need would depend on how your shipping company splits the World up, whether it's into countries, zones or continents. Make sure that when you are ticking the box to say you ship to a certain country (configure countries), you must set up a shipping method. If you don't, the customer will not be charged for shipping. Richard. |
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 3:36pm
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Support - not "rcass", How do you override the weight on each country? rcass - if I knew how parcel2go split the world up, it might be a happier place, but alas I don't.At least not without trawling through manually spotting the breakpoints. It would be too much to ask that P2G issued info like that. :) The only thing I can see that may improve the situation is that until I know whether items go by air or by road, then I can't know whether or not a volumetric maximum weight for a given carton size will be active as the effective override for the price.So long as my basket weight total is less than relevant volumetric maximum in my "International" weight table then some measure of more accurate pricing is available. But without individual country (or group of countries) tables then it gets riskier, as the information I use to arbitrarily set my groups up (e.g 1000 mile radius from UK, 5000, etc,etc - you get the idea.it may not correspond with ANY known shippers way of doing it. e.g UPS, Ipost, and the like. In the 21st century it is still the case that petty little firms keep useful information "a secret" which is daft. If Romancart had written a user manual and flogged it, this forum wouldn't be needed. regards Dave ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: rscass
Date Posted: 22 February 2018 at 9:31pm
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Hi Dave, It's frustrating. But at least you can pick and choose which countries you want to prioritise - you don't have to set up 200 in one go. Couriers such as Parcelforce and DPD operate a zone system. Each zone has a price band and a number of countries assigned to it. Both of these companies offer fixed EU shipping rates up to 30kg/size massive - so pricing is predictable. So much so that it's easy to offer a fixed price, knowing that very few customers will order something so huge and heavy that it won't go at the standard rate (presumably you're not a sandbag salesman). That's all well and good if you have an account. Trouble with parcel2go is that the shipping rates seem to vary from one day to the next. Outside of the EU, most of the major couriers also have remote area surcharges which you only find out about when you put the recipient's postcode in. I have no useful suggestion other than only use this method for countries that work for you. I no longer send Worldwide - it was too bloody complicated. Richard. |
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 6:31am
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Ain't that the truth. ;) This is a market (for me at least) that is becoming more and more important to my business and phaffing around like this to try and work out how to bend /adapt RC is tedious in the extreme. Ah well. regards Dave ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: Support
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 7:58am
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Hi Dave, I'm not sure what extra functionality RomanCart could provide which would make this any easier for you. If you have any ideas of what you would need please post them here. In the USA there are automatic calculators for couriers such as USPS however as far as we are aware these are not available in the UK. Many Thanks Support |
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 9:41am
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Hi, the question I asked you was "how do you override the weights for each country?", I am having a moan, but that wasn't your job to answer me - I was talking to "rcass" I can only see a shipping override per product / per shipping method (which is selected by total weight, and a selected country from a known table. By that point the country info is lost, therefore it can only be an overide for that product, provided the selected country exists in the appropriate country weight table and breaks the override weight maximum. So to create this as described you would need some 200+ tables (one per country - each with an override trigger weight defined by the maximum you would ship there. Or have I got it wrong? - That's why I asked you (support) but you chose not to see it. regards Dave ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: Support
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 9:44am
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Hi, You override the weight for each shipping method using the overrideweight param for that shipping method in the shipping section of the product properties. Many Thanks Support |
Posted By: Support
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 9:45am
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Hi, After having re-read your question - yes - if your shipping is different for lots of countries then you would need to set up lots of shipping methods. Edit: It's worth mentioning though that as the cart uses geolocation the customer would only see the shipping methods relevant to their location. Many Thanks Support |
Posted By: dch1950
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 10:37am
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classic - so the answer to my question is - you can't override it. A really useful feature would be if an entry for the weight of the basket in any country table didn't exist- the put up a user defined message to "please contact me - the vendor for a quote" D ------------- Dave H |
Posted By: Support
Date Posted: 23 February 2018 at 10:42am
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Hi, I'm obviously missing something here.... Please let me know which bit I am not understanding. With shipping you set up shipping methods and apply multiple regions to it. For example in the UK most merchants have UK, Europe and Rest of World shipping methods, with the respective countries set on them. You can change the weight for each of those shipping methods for each item if required. If you require individual shipping methods for each country then you would set those up and could then override the weight for each country. It would be a lot of work though. Many Thanks Support |