With Exact packing you can either specify a product ships in its own box, or you can allow it to ship with other products in a shared box.
1. Ship SKU in own unique Box
This configuration is probably the one you will use the most. It can be found under the Individual Shipping Boxes tab in the product listing.
Here you can define the boxes that an item can ship in, and create rules around when these boxes are used. It’s possible to define more than one possible box, but bear in mind only one will be selected by the extension based on it’s logic to determine the best one for the situation.
A box can be a shared box, that is using the Box dropdown and selecting one from there, or an individual unshared box that is only used by this product (set using the dimensions length, width, height).
You have the following configuration options:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Max Quantity Allowed in this Box | The maximum quantity you can have in each box. For example you could say max qty of 5, then if I say had 10 of these products in the cart it would ship in 2 boxes |
| Min Box valid From | The minimum quantity that must be in the cart before this box can be used. So if you set it to say 20 then if there were under 20 of these items then this box would not be used |
| Max Qty valid To | The maximum quantity that must be in the cart before this box can be used. So if you set it to say 20 then if there were over 20 of these items then this box would not be used. Note that this is very different from max qty allowed in a box. If the qty is exceeded here even if it could say go in 4 boxes of 5 it wouldn’t allow this box to be used. For most customers (and if in doubt) set this field to be -1. Only use if you want to explicitly say a box cannot be used after a certain qty is in the cart. |
The extension is clever enough to work out the percentage of the box used by each item when dimensions are set. Using this information it is able to determine when a box is full, even if this box contains other items which may have different characteristics. See our examples section for more information on this.
2. Set SKU to ship in a Shared Box
This is the same as setting a product to ship in its own custom boxes, apart from you select the boxes rather than define them yourself. This will then tell the extension to use the shared boxes for packing. You can if you want combine custom boxes with the shared boxes, the extension will look at the best-fit for packing based on an internal algorithm.
Bear in mind it may still ship the SKU in its own box, with no other items, depending on how you have the rules set up.
Read more in: How does Dimensional Shipping work out which individual box items fit into?
3. Advanced Configurations
- Adding different products to the same boxes
- Adding any quantity of products to a box
- Updating products’ dimensions and assigned boxes en masse
- Limit the number of products placed in a box