We have items that ship in multiple boxes. When orders are processed customers are inaccurately charged for shipping. If Some One orders Product A which ships in three 25lb boxes the current module only gives us the option to enter the total weight of the product which would be 75lbs. This gives an entirely different quote.
What I propose is a module that adds a new field in the shipping section of each product (How Many Boxes does this product ship in?) The default would be one but if increased it would give additional fields to enter dimension and weghts of all boxes which would then be used to properly calculate shipping rates on such orders.
Product examples:
An order of 5,000 1/2 Page Flyers ships in two 40lb Boxes
Customer orders bed. Headboard ships in 75lb box and rails ship in 50lb box.
I have looked all over for a fix to this problem. Not just on this platform but other open source solutions. If no such module exists I would like to know how much it would cost to have one created and how long it would take to implement. I know this is something that would be of help to many people as I have seen multiple forum posts regarding this in different open source communities but nobody has yet to address this issue.
Thank You
Comments
Working on it
Hi,
I was looking for the same thing. I started working on a module tonight to provide this functionality. My client has some spa restoration kits and furniture items that ship in multiple boxes.
You can also try creating a product kit. For your bed, the rails would be one product, the headboard would be another. You just hide the individual products from being viewed. The reason I shy away from doing this is twofold:
1) The individual products appear in the cart.
2) It is extra work for the client to enter the products.
I'll keep you posted on the status of the module.
Jim
Product Shipping Calculation
This issue of multiple component items price and shipping calculation not properly addressed in e-commerce solutions. It is great to see a solution for this.
Multiple items price?
@wisdom: What do you mean by multiple component items price? This module won't address that. Are you talking about buy-one-get-one type of price calculations and so forth?
There is some discussion on that here:
http://www.ubercart.org/forum/announcements/972/product_features_system_...
Multiple Component Item
Multiple component item in case of a computer a CPU box, monitor, printer, etc. The order may contain all or few of these components and shipping cost may vary accordingly.
Multiple Component Item
Why? If you bundle some items together in one package? This is very tricky.
For your example, if you ship all of the items in one box, you can create a product for each combination of a PC, monitor, and printer. This would be very time consuming. If you ship them in separate boxes, then the default configuration, or product kits would seem to work fine.
I use the following example: A customer orders a microwave, crock pot, salad spinner, and cheese grater. The shipping department puts the cheese grater in the salad spinner, in the crock pot, in the microwave and ships it in one package. The possibilities seem endless. It seems to take a human being to figure this out. I imagine that you could create a multitude of Conditional Actions that update the shipping based on what is in the cart. I'm sorry, but I cant wrap my head around how any module could help in this case.
For the problem defined by the original poster:
In the case of the multiple packages per item, we are talking about a single product ( not multiple, not product kits ). The Ubercart uc_products table stores the dimensions, weight, and corresponding units in the same table row as the product. Therefore, you are limited to having only one package defined per product. The interfaces correspond to this setup, allowing only one package per product.
The module I'm writing circumvents this by adding an additional uc_product_package table that contains a many to one relationship to the product. In this way, you can create multiple packages for one item. This seems predominantly useful for larger items that come unassembled. In the example of furniture, a bed may only be sold as a whole unit, yet the headboard and rails ship in different boxes. In this case, you need to define two packages for this product. The product should still only appear as one line item in the cart, and you cannot purchase each package individually.
Jim
Progress
The base module is created, including the following:
* DB table
* Install / uninstall functions
* Access (permissions)
* Save, edit, delete functions
* New tab on the product edit page
* A nice AHAH form for adding packages
* Unsetting of the default weight & dimensions fields on the product edit page
What needs to be done:
* A button and callback to delete a package
* Integration with shipping calculations
* integration with the order admin interface