What is Dimensional Shipping?
Standard Magento lacks some of the features needed to calculate shipping accurately for FedEx, UPS and USPS.
For example, you can’t
- Define dimensions for your products
- Choose to ship some products separately
- Choose to ship some products together in the same package
- Add insurance to the shipping
- Split a product that exceeds the carrier’s weight maximum into multiple boxes
Our Dimensional Shipping extension gives you the ability to
- Specify the dimensions of your products
- Create different sized boxes for your products
- Describe how different combinations of products are packed together for smart shipping
- Ship some products in a separate box
- Assign multiple box sizes to a product and choose when each box size is used
- Split large products into multiple boxes with different dimensions
Whereas other solutions work by filling one box after another, Dimensional Shipping allows you to define exactly how your business packs different combinations of products.
When a customer goes to check out Dimensional Shipping works out how the products in the cart will be packed. Then it sends the dimensional weight and actual weight of the packages to your shipping carrier for accurate live shipping rates.
How Do I use this Knowledge Base?
This knowledge base goes through the installation and setup of the WebShopApps Dimensional Shipping extension. By the end of the series you should hopefully have your site running the extension successfully and retrieving Dimensional Shipping Rates.
Before you start make sure you have an account with the respective Carrier, else you won’t be able to retrieve rates.
The first step is to install the extension. Once its installed you will see the following changes:
- A new section called Dimensional Shipping under System->Configuration->Shipping Settings
- Additional fields under the FedEx, UPS and USPS carriers giving you advanced features such as the ability to ship larger loads
- New section under Catalog->Manage Shipping Boxes to specify the boxes dimensions and max weight/quantities that you use within this store
- A new tab called shipping under the Product listings, where you can set products to ship separately and specify if they can be split across boxes
- Three new tabs under Product Listings for specifying the boxes that a product can possibly fit into
In order to get the extension configured you need to look at each of these sections in turn. The next articles in the series deal with this in more detail.
Once configured you will need to test the extension to ensure its working correctly. We cover how to get logging showing in Dimensional Shipping and give a troubleshooting guide.