Volumetric Shipping

[TBird1]

As over 50% of our business is outside of the UK I need to be able to calculate Volumetric Shipping.

According to previous discussions on these forums this is not possible with Actinic v7.

Can anyone confirm

a. Has this situation changed ie is it possible to do this now
b. If not, will the feature be built in to v8
c. When is v8 expected ?
d. If not b. are there any 3rd party plugins that provide this ?

Many thanks,

TBird1

[jont]

a: no
b: unknown until v8 released - all new additions are closely guarded by Actinic
c: "sometime this year" is about as much as can be expected
d: not that I am aware of but someone else may know

[TBird1]

Thanks Jont.

At least we know where we're at for the moment. . . . unless anybody out there has more to add . . . . ?

[Mike Hughes]

It probably depends on exactly what you want to do.

If you just want to base shipping cost on the volume (and or weight) then you should be able to create a shipping table where you use weight as the volumetric equivalent. You could then link this in from an excel spreadsheet to avoid having to do the calculations manually.

Mike

[tom.jolly]

Volumetric shipping solution

I too have been agonising over this for some time now but I believe I may have found a neat little solution. It involves a bit of work messing aound with the shipping tables in Excel but it works.
My problem was that a small percentage of the items that I sell are too big to be sent as a small packet abroad using Royal Mail. I had to find some way of making Actinic eliminate this shipping method when an oversized parcel was bought as part of an order and defaulting only to the Parcelforce option (in my case). I have the same problem with domestic shipments and so have to use Standard Parcels in the UK.
The obvious solution to me, which was verified after reading the posts in this forum, was to create a bogus weight for each of these items (I added 1000 kg), create a new class of shipping for them with weights starting from 1000.5 kg and lastly tag each item as being shipped seperately.
It turned out though that there are a few serious problems with this solution. For the "bulky" items shipping class you have a weight gap up to 1000.5 kg (if 0.5 kg is your first weight level) that is going to remain as an option for virtually all your other products. So if a customer places a heavy order made up of a number of smaller items, the lowest price in the bulky items shipping class will remain as an option right the way up to 1000.5 kg (effectively as a flat rate). As far as I am aware there is no way of telling Actinic to only offer a shipping class if the order is over a certain weight.
Secondly if a customer purchased two items that had been artificially lifted by 1000 kg each it would breach the maximum weight allowed, and even if there was no limit it would not reflect the correct postage cost.
Lastly if the larger items are tagged as being shipped seperately you are going to very quickly price yourself out of the market because the postage cost calculation will escalate to silly levels.
Without further waffling this is the solution I came up with:
1. Identify the items in your inventory that are too bulky to be sent by Small Packets (or by Royal Mail post within the UK) and add 1000 kg to their weight.
2. Create a shipping class for the method you are going to use to send these items (or simply extend a class you already have for smaller items). If the class is brand new you need to add the first tier of weight and postage price bands up to an appropriate weight (I chose 20 kg as we have never had an order coming even close to that). Then create the second tier starting at 1000.5 kg up to 1020 kg. Then a third tier from 2000.5 kg up to 2020 kg. Repeat this process for as many times as you need. Check the opton that does not allow excess weight. Essentially this is the only part of the process where you have to make a judgement call. For instance we have never had an order that has included more than 3 bulky items. Therefore it is safe to assume that 6 tiers from bottom to top should be enough for us. If your business regularly sends out orders of 20 bulky items in one go, then you are just going to have to create up to 30 tiers to be safe. As far as I am aware there is no limit to the number of records in a shipping table so it is possible.
3. You DO NOT need to tag each bulky item as being shipped seperately. If you do you will run into problems regarding total order cost and very quickly lose business.

The effect of this system is simple: if a customer orders 2 bulky items in addition to a number of smaller items (eg 1002.1 kg + 1001.7 kg + 0.435 kg (smaller items totalling) = 2004.235 kg), the shipping price will be taken from the tier that begins with 2000.5 kg. So while the system uses an articifially high weight to eliminate non-appropriate shipping methods it also allows more than one bulky item to be ordered without breaching the limits and the non-bulky items with their real weight can be included and accounted for accurately in the shipping calculation.
I have only just come up with this after hours at my desk imitating the pose of Michael Angelo's David! So if anyone does see any flaws in it let me know!