Volumetric weight calculation

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

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.

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.

Edited by rscass - 22 February 2018 at 1:23pm

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.

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