Shipping Calculations for Large Products

I've noticed that Zen Cart only uses weight to calculate shipping (or at least as far as I can tell). How do you guys generally deal with items with unusual dimensions?

One kind of item to be included in a shop I'm setting up would be wood martial art practice swords. I'm assuming the shipping price for a long narrow, relatively light box would not be correct using only weight.

Am I mistaken? It seems like not only Zen Cart, but almost all free or cheap carts calculate shipping by weight only.

I have the same problem, setting up a shop to sell antiques & art.

The way I understand it, a shipping module (e.g. Royal Mail') 'reads' dispatch address, destination address, quantity & individual weight from the item description entered in admin, then uses this information to calculate the cost of various shipping options.

Royal Mail charges a lot more for an oil painting because of its awkward shape. However, there is no way to include this fact in the item description, so the module cannot take it into account.

The best I can come up with is to suggest looking up the standard price & the 'unusual shape' price, then increase the stated weight of the item until you make up the difference. You would need to mention this in the item description, so the customer does not think they are being overcharged.

As long as the module only calculates the cost & adds it to the total, this might work. However, the extra weight that is right for one destination country might not be right for others...

In my client's business, every product is unique, so this a potential show-stopper.

Any antique dealers out there who can help us out, please?

Lightfoot:

Am I mistaken? It seems like not only Zen Cart, but almost all free or cheap carts calculate shipping by weight only.

The issue isn't really with the shopping carts, it is more to do with the shipping modules available for the cart(s), and it has nothing to do with whether the cart is 'free or cheap' either. There are some very expensive commercial offerings that also fail in this department.

The main problem is that shopping carts tend to be used in almost every country on the planet, and each country has its on shipping companies that charge by different methods, not to mention that different merchants also have their own unique needs and requirements. I've yet to see any shopping cart that will satisfy all of the variables and situations involved.

zen-cart and other GPL type shopping carts tend to be better in this regards than most commercial offerings because the nature of GPL means that people are able to add/edit and modify the code to suit thier own local needs. Zen-cart also stands out as one of the leaders in the pack because it has been designed in such a way that the shipping aspects can be added as a module, which makes it easy for 3rd party developers to create and share the code that they develop.

As a practical example of this, I know of at least two shipping modules for zencart that will quote based on dimensions (as well as weight). These are the Canada post module and the Australia Post modules (ozpost - developed by yours truely). Needless to say, neither of these modules will be of any use to you unless your store is based in Australia or Canada, but that isn't the point I'm trying to make. The point is, that zencart has as much, or more chance of supporting what you require than almost any other shopping cart available, and it has nothing to do with cost.

Cheers
Rod

Would you know of any international carriers that can do this & are served by modules that will work from the UK?.. or any other way around the problem?

My ideal would be an add-on that would simply allow you to manually enter a price for a number of destination countries in the admin module, in the same way as you would enter the item price.

BTW, I'm writing this in Firefox, which is running under Ubuntu & I chose Zen Cart because it was all Open Source. I take your point.

Surely there must be many people who would use Zen Cart if it offered a practical means of dealing with businesses which sell unique items (rare book dealers, artists &c, &c, &c,).

Oh....

& just out of interest, how does the vendor tell the shipping modules that accommodate large awkward shaped parcels what the product dimensions actually are?

They would not be much use if they relied on the customer to pass this information on, as they might tend to choose the cheapest option.

mike_9000:

Would you know of any international carriers that can do this & are served by modules that will work from the UK?.

I'm in Australia so I'm definitely the wrong person to be asking this question.

What do other UK zencart merchants use?

Cheers
Rod

mike_9000:

Oh....

& just out of interest, how does the vendor tell the shipping modules that accommodate large awkward shaped parcels what the product dimensions actually are?

They would not be much use if they relied on the customer to pass this information on, as they might tend to choose the cheapest option.

The ozpost module just adds a few more data fields to the products table in the SQL database. The Merchant inputs the dimensions into these fields.

Cheers
Rod

Thanks mate.

I understand the problem better now - & that's progress!