Setting up Shipping has been a total pain. Our store is a week a way from our launch date and we can't order test due to shipping not working correctly. The support staff is stellar and very response to all concerns but that hasn't solved the issue. Perhaps I'm thinking about it all wrong. I've used real time shipping and this works great if the customer only buys one item. Some of the items that we sell make sense to be sold in multiple quantities. They are very small and can fit into flat rate boxes. Though when 5 of the same item is sold then the shipping cost is 5 times higher than necessary. Sadly the dimensions of packaging has no factor into the checkout price yet can factor into our cost. I'm wondering others experience with shipping has been. What has worked, what has not. Any info would be appreciated.
Thank you,
-Brian
It sounds like you're trying to make a shipping solution much more complicated than you should. You want to make sure that the shoppers can clearly understand your shipping rates, so it may be a lot easier on you and them to just have flat rate shipping options instead of trying to use calculated methods. What's happening with the calculator is that the sum of the weight is being applied to calculate the shipping rates, so you may also want to check and make sure your weights are accurate. If you're rounding the weights, you may want to be more precise to get better calculated rate information.
Still, my recommendation would be to look at using flat rates that are a lot easier to calculate and understand instead of making the buyer use a calculator to figure out how much they might have to pay -- there are a number of buyers that will just go look somewhere else if they have to do any work to figure out the shipping amount.
Flat rate shipping would not be optimal. For instance an item that weighs one once ships at 4.95 usps priority mail. When 2 quantities of that item are ordered the shipping bumps up 9.90 and continues to add that way to each item added to the cart. Flat rate would only make sense in sections, as to say within every weight bracket there could be a standard rate applied. If this is possible then it may be a good route to go.
As of now if you were to look at our rates table I have every pound mapped from 1 to 49 with small increments of price being added for each pound. This seems to intense to be the only way.
Another concern I have is that if we are offering free shipping over a certain amount spent, is there any way to have a weight limit cap to that?
You could have the flat rate be $4.95 for the first item and $0.25 for each additional item. It sounds like you didn't configure any additional item values so the first item value was repeated.
The banded weight model should work as well, and should be pretty universal for you. Just make sure you have valid weights for each of the items so the aggregate total is what you expect. If you've taken items and rounded to the closest pound (so you just marked them as a pound instead of 0.125 pounds), you make end up with multiple quantity of a light item showing a weight much higher than you expect.
For the free shipping, you could have a promotion apply to certain classes of products and a minimum threshold, but there's no way to have a maximum threshold. If you have products that should not qualify, they can be assigned to classifications that are not part of the promotion that discounts the shipping rates.