Overview

There are two products that need to be shipped together: one sofa piece and two mobile phones.

Two sofa piece can fit in a 10x10x10 box and six mobile (cell) phones can fit into the same box. So, these need to ship together.

Setup

As the quantity of each product that can fit into the boxes is known the packing algorithm used is Exact Packing.

Because the products can be shipped together in the same box the box will need to be defined first so that it can be applied to the two products. Create the shipping box to be used in Catalog > Manage Shipping Boxes.

Next, apply the box to each of the products. Exact Packing is being used, rather than Best Fit so the attributes under the “Shipping” tab (ship_height, ship_width, ship_depth and ship_possible_boxes) can be left alone (if present).

Assign the box to the phone. Only the “Max Qty allowed in this Box” should be used. For more information about these fields, see the article on how Dimensional works out which box items fit into.

Do the same again for the sofa piece, substituting a quantity of 6 for a quantity of 2.

Effectively, this will denote that one sofa piece takes up 1/2 of the capacity of the box, whereas one phone takes up 1/6 of the capacity of the box. Fractionally, this will work out that the box has 3/6 + 2/6 of the box’s capacity used so they will fit into the same box.

This can be checked via the logs, as detailed in the Troubleshooting guide or, if enabled, the package breakdown at the cart estimator.

The log in the above screenshot shows that one 10x10x10 box is being sent to the carrier with one sofa piece and two phones so this has been packed correctly.

By comparison, the package breakdown also shows that one 10x10x10 box is being used with one sofa piece and two phones.