Weight varying by attribute value

[chabrenas]

Does anyone have experience and advice about setting up shipping costs by weight when an item can have a weight that varies considerably depending on a choice such as size (take shoes, for example)?

One way out would be to break product down into a small number of blocks (say three or four for a whole range of shoe sizes/weights).

[chabrenas]

Looking through the results of a forum search covering 2002 - 2006 convinces me that I must create a product for every weight I want to use to calculate shipping charges. Since the site I'm working on deliberately keeps product price markup low and recovers shipping & handling and most of the profit from the shipping charge, I don't have too big a problem. Just break each product into a small number of weight bands and set shipping costs to guarantee a safe margin on the worst case.

Ideally, weight should be definable in the product, and inherited or over-ridden in a child attribute - but then you'd have to deal with the case of multiple attributes per product, and whether more than one of these can have an associated weight, and what options you allow for combining them (e.g. take the greatest weight value). Shipping & handling is a complex subject - I"ll bet the Wish List reflects this.