Dividing the order up into multiple packages?

[vistamaster]

Hi everyone,

Can someone tell me what am i doing wrong please?

I have looked at every help/guide available to me to figure out how to divide the order up into multiple packages, but unfortunately, none of them could answer to my questions...

Situation:

I have products with weights between 100 grams to 20 kg, i'm using Parcelforce to ship orders under 150 KG, orders weighting more than that we send on a pallet.

As per parcelforce requirement not to exceed 30 KG per item, we decided to use actinics ability to split the order into packages upto 30 KG using 'optimal weigth field' in business settings and charge the customer accordingly, because charging fixed amount per item upto 30 KG is not an option.

So ideally we would like actinic to calculate the delivery charge for orders upto 150 KG and if the order exceeds that weigth I need actinic to leave the highest amount instead of keep on calculating.

I can do free delivery on orders over certain amount, but thats not an option aswell, I can also charge by weight in 20 KG interval which i'm currently doing, but noticed that customer would save more if we let actinic fill up our boxes up to 30 KG...

So far I have achieved actinic to divide orders into multiple packages and it works quite well, but has anyone an idea how to get actinic to calculate delivery charge for orders up to 150 KG but keep on dividing them into multiple packages?

I have played with settings tried almost every possible configuration but with no luck...

SOS please ;-)

[leehack]

Thread moved to the shipping forum.

[leehack]

Instead of using optimum weight, what is stopping you from adding in your own tiers and applying a price for that tier? If someone orders 60kg, you currently get actinic to split it into 2 x 30kg packages, so what's the difference to you putting in both a 30kg and a 60kg tier with relevant charge. If 30kg is £10, put in 60kg as £20, 90kg as £30 etc....

In order to stop the charges at 150kg, have 150kg as your last tier and then set the 'excess' charges accordingly right below where you set the tiers. You also then have the free over option if you so desire.

If you are not happy with the first tier being set at 30kg, simply break that up into any kind of tier you like, if say 10kg will be £5, then put a 10kg tier in at £5.

NOTE: remember that any tier you set is an 'UP TO' value.

[vistamaster]

Instead of using optimum weight, what is stopping you from adding in your own tiers and applying a price for that tier? If someone orders 60kg, you currently get actinic to split it into 2 x 30kg packages, so what's the difference to you putting in both a 30kg and a 60kg tier with relevant charge. If 30kg is £10, put in 60kg as £20, 90kg as £30 etc....

In order to stop the charges at 150kg, have 150kg as your last tier and then set the 'excess' charges accordingly right below where you set the tiers. You also then have the free over option if you so desire.

If you are not happy with the first tier being set at 30kg, simply break that up into any kind of tier you like, if say 10kg will be £5, then put a 10kg tier in at £5.

NOTE: remember that any tier you set is an 'UP TO' value.

thanks for the reply Lee, but it is impossible to add my own tiers as you suggesting mainly because for example a bag of adhesive weights 20 KG, if customer orders 3 then according to my own tiers I should be charging for 60 KG and to make the most of parcelforce service I should be sending 60kg in 2 packages which makes it impossible, because I cannot break one 20kg bag of adhesive into 2 x 10 kg bags...

i am currently using tiers at intervals of up to 30kg then up to 20kg every additional, but it works out more expensive if customer orders 2 x 20kg bags and 4 x 5kg bags, total weight is 60 kg, which falls between 50-70 in my tier, basically the csutomer pays for extra 10 kg which is not needed. by using actinic to split the order i get 2 nice packages and customer only pays for what hes buying...

any ideas? I do believe there is a workaround this, as I am not the first actinic user who is using parcelforce...

[leehack]

Right I think i've gotcha, you can send up to 30kg with them, but if someone orders 3 x 20kg packages, that does in fact need to be sent as 3 packages, because no way to use the extra 10kg unless you split a bag up. But that screws up if you have optimal weight in the mix.

Hmmm, let me have a think, my initial reaction is if these 20kg products have to be treated as 30kg packages, put that in as the weight, i can see that you will say if someone orders 20kg and 2 x 5kg though, they will be overcharged....indeed.

My 2nd thought would be category based shipping on these troublesome 20kg packages to take them out of the normal equation, but i can see that could also cause problems as above.

My 3rd thought is using the alternate weight so they are treated volumetrically instead, perhaps you can use that so that when just a 20kg is ordered, it uses alternate weight (im thinking 29.99kg), but when say ordered with 2 x 5kg products, the real weight will kick back in as that overrides the alternate weight then. This is the option i think will work or the one i'm initially thinking is the solution.

If that doesn't work it will be a case of some lateral thinking on weights, where you will need to tweak them to take them out of the usual tiers, for instance if you had 20.01 as the weight on these buggers and then had a tier just above the 60kg (60.03kg) you could add a 3 x shipping cost on that tier and then just after that jump back down to normal. In fact i think this would work as you are basically adding 10g of weight onto troublesome products, so that you can identify them and cater for them in the shipping. Try the alternate weight option first though.

[vistamaster]

thanks for your thoughts, the thing is, i already achieved how to charge customers correctly as per step by step guide on shipping charges, the only thing they forgot to mention that how to stop it calculating that delivery charge at certain level,

I've set 30kg in optimal weight in configuration and up to 30 kg in zone/class table, which works very well, and does exactly what I want, however I want actini to stop calculating at 150 kg, so I checked do not allow excess button in zone/class table, but actinic is simply ignorring the setting do not allow excess above the 150 kg, if i set do not allow over 30 kg it works just fine...

ideally I wanted actinic to show highest table value on orders over 150 kg, but it kept on calculating, so i created another shipping class for items over 150 kg and entered a fixed price. So now small items under 30 kg can be sent via 2 classes and over 30 kg can only be sent via class #2

but it looks very ugly, i want one shipping class called Standard Delivery and actinic to stop calculating the shipping cost at 150 kg

volumetric is good for bulky but light, and ours are small but heavy lol

[leehack]

So there's a clash between optimum weight and the excess charges setting, that sounds like a system setting and most likely one it will be impossible to get round, what happens with optimum weight included, excess set to take highest and a tier set at 150kg, does that circumvent it?

I think i finally understand your shipping lol, if doing it from scratch pretty sure i could do it, i'd certainly not use optimum weight though, then again, you could be one of the first ever shipping mysteries i cannot solve!

Mike will join in soon, he's anal on all this lateral thinking too and loves a mystery to solve.

[vistamaster]

def not an easy one lol

it's one of the most important things within our sector, to ensure we correctly calculate delivery costs, because items are heavy, silly mistake or miscalculation and the delivery cost of that item may get doubled or tripled...

[Mike Hughes]

LOL. Love you too Lee.

I have to admit I'm impressed you've got this far. I suspect though that you've hit the buffers with the way actinic does it's calculations on the shipping.

You could try setting the pallete costs to a shipping band over 150Kg but I wouldn't be surprised if Actinic just breaks the order down into your 30Kg 'optimal' packages and then decides there's nothing over 150Kg to worry about (but probably would assign a 200Kg product to that band if you had one).

So what Actinic seems to be doing makes sense, it just isn't what you're after.

The second shipping class should be a workable option, but as you say there's no way of hiding it for lighter orders.

Which only seems to leave us the option of 'breaking' actinic's shipping to make it do what we want.

I can think of two ways of doing this.

a) Hack the perl scripts. It all depends on how they're written but it could be as simple as testing the initial weight and if over 150Kg skip the repackage routine.

b) Use javascript on the shipping page. This seems to be a bit more effort as it would involve capturing the shipping options and only displaying the ones we want to based on the shipping weight.

I would probably go for the perl option as it might be a simple and elegant solution but the javascript option could be easier if it's not too complicated to get actinic to pass the shipping data values. The javascript option is certainly less likely to break something but will only work if the customer has javascript installed.

Mike

[vistamaster]

Hi Mike, thanks for joining in

hacking perl script sounds very good, because i would prefer using one class instead of two and then hiding one with js,

however i'm rubbish on any scripting unless its copy+paste , but i'm very good on ticking boxes lol

so logically thinking, the file that needs hacking is called ShippingTemplate.pl within the ShipControl folder, is that correct, or i'm not good on logical thinking either?

Rytis

[Mike Hughes]

OK. This is untested and you'll still have some work to do.

It looks to me as if the best place to do this is down where it calculates the shipping charge. You should find a bit of code where it says (i'm looking at V9 at the moment)

# Calculate the sum of weights for further evaluation
#
my $dSumOfWeights = 0.0; # shows the sum of weights of all the packages
foreach $dWeight (@$parrSortedWeightKeys) # go through our sorted weights
{
$dSumOfWeights += $$phashWeightToQuantity{$dWeight} * $dWeight; # add the weight of each package to the sum
}
#

This gives us the total weight.

I think the cleanest way to do this is to use the total weight to trigger the 'Default Charge' as the pallet cost. It looks like we can do this by adding this code just after the bit above:

#
# Handle overweight packages by triggering the default shipping charge as a cost for pallets.
#
#
if($dSumOfWeights > 150)
{
return(SetDefaultCharge());
}

#

What I don't know is what units actinic is using for the weight here so where I've put 150 it might need to be 150000 etc.

Then you should be able to change the 'default shipping' description to say 'Pallet Delivery' and give it the appropriate charge.

Mike

PS.

1. Make copies of your files before editing them.
2. Test thoroughly. This method will allow undefined shipping to be ordered at the default rate.
3. The place I'm doing is within the bit for mailing service providers

#
# Now handle SSPs if required
#
if (@$pProviderList > 0)

Which means it might not be triggered at all in which case you'll probably need to create the whole total weight calculation again outside of this test.

[vistamaster]

Thanks Mike, I'm just thinking if this hack would work with offline orders aswell?

I think there should be a possibility to add a bit of code to tell actinic to use max entered weight from the table like that radio button in excess area, but cant figure out why is it ignoring it.

if i don't set optimal weight, then "use highest table" value works fine, and it works fine when i set the same weight inside "up to weight" in zone/classes table and "optimal weight" in weight configuration, but as soon as i set bigger weight inside "up to weight" in zone/classes, actinic just ignores that radio button to use the highest table value in excess area and keeps on calculating

also I just noticed, when it comes to dividing orders into packages (at the order shipping & handling screen) actinic ignores the shipping quantity and splits the item it simply divides the whole weigth equally per package

maybe its a bug? can someone recreate my situation in v10? ive already used up my trial time with v10, but didn't try that configuration because we didn't use parcelforce at the time...

Rytis

[Mike Hughes]

The perl script change will only work for online orders.

I'm not sure actinic is ignoring the max weight as it's probably able to repackage the orders to keep them below the maximum weight. To check this you could try with a 200Kg product that can't be repackaged and see what happens.

In terms of the specific problems you're experiencing I don't have an answer for you. I don't use the multiple package facility myself so can only go on logic / guesswork on this.

You might have found a bug. This is a fairly complicated setup so it might need some high level support to find the best way to get it working.

Mike

[chickenhouseman]

We send 20 kg bags of chicken feed. To stop them being sent together with lighter items we set their weight in actinic to just below our parcel weight limit of 28kg. our shipping prices are tier to match this then once we get past 150kg our pallet rate kicks in.

[leehack]

I don't think this is a bug at all, it's working exactly as i'd expect when i think about it. You have rather specific shipping requirements and the reality is that the options open to you do not quite match your requirement, you require extra functionality, that's all.

All you need is a new field that you can fill out when you use optimum weight and set how many times that should occur until 'no charge is hit'. So for instance you'd set your 30kg optimum weight and then in an extra new field, you'd set 5 as how many times for that to happen before no extra charge kicked in.

When you set 30kg as your optimum weight, what software would have a rule to stop how many packages of that size that someone could buy, that'd be a bit barmy. Remember that the 'excess' part is there to cater for purchase going outside of your standard rules, your situation isn't, it's comfortably inside. It's not Sainsbury's where they might want to limit how BOGOFs you can have in any one purchase for instance and that is why 'excess' settings are not the option here.

On one hand your setting 150kg as the ceiling for charging, but on the other you're saying split packages into 30kg parcels, anything in your tiers over 30kg is in fact totally irrelevant because your optimum weight kicks in and handles it and rightly so.

Simon's solution won't work for you as outlined in another post because you can send 30kg per parcel and if you set the 20kg products to actually be 30kg, then when someone orders 1 x 20kg and 2 x 5kg, they would in fact move into 2 optimum iterations, when the reality is that it should be one. Simon's solution only works if you have no smaller products that can fill the gap in between the 20kg actual weight and the 30kg possible posting weight ceiling.

Using optimum weight is not an option for you to get what you ideally want, all it will do is get you close, your only complete solution is possibly with alternate weight IMO (forget that is designed for light but large parcels and concentrate on how it works alongside normal weight, i think it will do what you want with a bit of thought). If the 20kg products are set at 24.99, that will trigger the 30kg charge, likewise if someone orders 1 x 20kg and 1 x 5kg or 1 x 20kg and 2 x 5kg, then the actual weight will kick back in as that weight is now the largest when compared. I believe actual weight and alternate weight are compared and the highest weight is taken, I think that's the loophole that gets your solution for you.

That's the only way this can be done if indeed that works, there is not enough functionality to do what you want, you cannot get settings that are quite opposite ends of the function scale to marry up, they are not meant to work together as far as i can see and i think that is totally correct.