Problem with shipping cost

[erin]

We went live with the shop and all was well then we wanted to change the shipping bands. So we went into business settings and added the US, however now the price based on weight will not work on UK posting or EU posting.

We have setup
weight for seeds as 0
weight for plants as 1

then for shipping we use
0.99 £1.50
1 £3.95

However since this change it now give free postage for seeds and the correct postage for plants. I cannot get this back to the way it was.

I have tried the web site purge and refresh again from troubleshooting but it will not work.

[Darren B]

I think you need to set you seeds to a weight, try 0.01 this will then make the shipping workout which band it is in

Cheers
Darren

[erin]

I had it working

I had it working yesterday on the 8.0.2 version, however when I upgraded to 8.0.3 and then changed the shipping it refused to work out the lower band price.

If I set it to 0.01 then seeds will be charged at the next band if they order over 100.

I will try this but we will have to change the terms and conditions to reflect this. We also use this to stop sending plants to the states. This would also mean that we could not send orders of over 99 seeds to the states either.

[erin]

Also

I had it working under version 6 without a problem.

[Darren B]

There had been problems with shipping in earlier versions of V8 and these got corrected in V8.03 which is why you might now see problems. I think it has been fixed to work correctly now, although not for you.

I know it would be an issue, but you would probably be best to make plants a higher band than 1, It is always good practise to leave large gaps between numbers, it was a common practise with computing never to number 1,2,3 e.t.c but to number 10, 20, 30 e.t.c

I know it it not much help but worth remembering for the future.

Cheers
Darren

[erin]

Testing

I have tested some seeds at 0.01 weight, and it still puts postage as zero. So even if this was a valid weight this method of charging for postage does not seem to work.

[leehack]

Erin can you provide a "print screen" or screenshot you might know it as, of your postage settings.

I understand shipping can be frustrating, i went through this feeling too. What i will say is that it is 99.99% sure that it is something you are doing.

If you can take 5 minutes to detail exactly what you want to do and provide a screenshot of your shipping table, i will sort it for you.

[erin]

Postage

We have plants and seeds. We can not send plants to the US, but we do to the UK.

We charge £1.50 if an order contains seeds (no matter how many) to the UK
and
£3.50 if an order contains plants (no matter how many) to the UK

and £3.95 for seeds posted to the US.

We have done this in the past, but it has stopped working in that it will charge the plants correctly, but charges zero for the seeds in the UK (the bulk of our orders).

We have set all plants to be "Weight" 1 and all seeds to be "weight" zero. I have also tried setting the seeds to non zero to see if this would solve the problem.

[leehack]

You are using default weight of 0.25. This weight will be added into any product where you do not specify a weight.

In your shipping table it says 0.90 for weight which will cost £1.50 in the UK.

Unless i have misunderstood, if someone chooses 4 packs of seeds, then the weight of the cart will be 1kg (4x0.25) and therefore will move onto the next tier of charging?

You also have optimal package weight chosen, if you use this and the weight of the cart goes over this, it will calculate multiple shipping packages.

If it was my shop and i wanted the solution you are after, i would do as follows:

Default weight on products would be 0.01kg, this would apply to all seeds. In other words, no weight input on any of the seeds and the default weight will be used.

On plants i would have 5kg input as the weight on each of my plant products.

My shipping table would then be:

0.00kg - £0.00
4.99kg - £1.50
5kg - £3.50

I would have no optimum package weight, i would ship by weight and on excess i would select to take highest value in table.

This would allow somebody to order 499 seed products and get them sent for £1.50.

They can order as many plants as they wish and they will always get them sent for the highest value in the table - £3.50.

If they order seeds and plants, then these will be sent for £3.50 as the inclusion of a plant will always mean that the weight of the cart will be in excess of 5kg.

Hope this helps.

Some of the confusion here maybe that you have set the "weight" label to display as "no. of plants". So when you see the No of plants in the shipping table it can be a little confusing. This label could say "banana custard" but it will still be shipping by weight. I would change this to "Weight in Kg" as this will explain far better what you are actually doing.

[erin]

Well it took some time but it works

I had to change all of the 2000 items and put it onto a test site (thank goodness for save/restore network settings), and so far it looks like it has worked. I still don't understand why, as the post above suggests that it would take the plant postage, but in fact it was taking a postage of zero, which on the face of it does not look right. There are limitations in doing it this way as expressed above, however these are acceptable so it looks like a workable solution. Thanks.

[leehack]

Erin, firstly i am glad that it is working for you. I will try and address a few of your points raised.

I had to change all of the 2000 items and put it onto a test site (thank goodness for save/restore network settings), and so far it looks like it has worked.

If you have 2000 items and you are having to change the weight on every single item, then you are not using Actinic to your advantage. You may not have grasped the "default weight" setting that you can use (apologies if you have and i have misunderstood).

If you have 2,000 products of which 1,500 are seeds and 500 are plants, then all you would need to do is choose which product you have the least of. In other words, in the above example, i would only ever put a weight in on the 500 items (plants). I would then include the weight of the seeds into the "default weight setting" in Actinic and (as long as you do not put any weight in on the seed products yourself), Actinic will add the default weight (you have input on the shipping settings) into each and every product without a weight specified. Hope that makes sense. If default weight is put in as 0.01kg and all seeds are this weight, then do not touch the individual weight attribute on each product and this 0.01kg will be automatically added.

I still don't understand why, as the post above suggests that it would take the plant postage, but in fact it was taking a postage of zero, which on the face of it does not look right.

I understand that you want to understand, i am very similar, you cannot learn if you do not understand. When we set the following shipping table up:

0.00kg - £0.00
4.99kg - £1.50
5kg - £3.50

It tells Actinic that if the weight of the product is 0.00kg, then charge nothing for shipping.

If somebody orders 10 lots of seeds, then the weight of the cart would 10 x 0.01kg, which is 0.1kg. If we look that value up in the above table, then 0.1kg would cost us £1.50.

If somebody orders 232 lots of seeds, then the weight of the cart would 232 x 0.01kg, which is 2.32kg. If we look that value up in the above table, then 2.32kg would cost us £1.50.

If somebody orders a plant, then the weight of the cart would 1 x 5kg, which is 5kg. If we look that value up in the above table, then 5kg would cost us £3.50.

If somebody orders 10 plants, then the weight of the cart would 10 x 5kg, which is 50kg. If we look that value up in the above table, we see that 50kg does not exist in the table, so how does it charge? This is where the "on excess, select to take highest value in table" setting comes to the rescue. This setting tells Actinic that if the total value of the cart comes to a weight higher than what we have specified in the shipping table, to take the highest value in there. The highest value in the table is £3.50, so however many plants and however heavy it becomes, the shipping cost can only ever be £3.50 as we have told Actinic that this is the maximum we ever want to charge.

NOW, where i think you have misunderstood my post is when a customer orders both plants and seeds.

If somebody orders 1 plant and 30 packs of seeds, then the weight of the cart would (1 x 5kg) + (30 x 0.01kg), which is 5.30kg. If we look that value up in the above table, we see that we do not have a shipping band for that weight, so this falls into exactly the same bracket as above and will default to the maximum we will ever charge.

There are limitations in doing it this way as expressed above, however these are acceptable so it looks like a workable solution. Thanks.

You said that for however many seeds someone orders, they will only ever get charged £1.50, whether they order 1 seed or 300 seeds.

You said that for however many plants someone orders, they will only ever get charged £3.50, whether they order 1 plant or 300 plants.

The solution i provided is not a workaround or workable it is a bonafide 100% guarantee that the shipping charges you want to charge will be. I don't see the limitations to which you refer? It is even future proof if your shipping charges go up, if you want to charge £2.50 to send seeds, then all you do is change the 0.01kg - £1.50 to 0.01kg - £2.50 instead.

Likewise on the plants if you want to start charging £4.50 delivery, then change 5.00kg - £3.50 to 5.00kg - £4.50 instead.

If you have this setup correct, there is only one stumbling block and that is if somebody orders 500 seeds, with the above setup, they will get charged £3.50 postage, this is easily amendable if you think anyone will ever order that many seeds.

Hope that explains it a bit better.

Good luck

Lee