Unable to set up different flat rate shipping prices for my products

After hours of reading the forum and brainstorming, I have yet to come up with a solution to my problem and I now have a headache!lol

Here's my situation: I recently started a print brokerage company where I design print materials (postcards, flyers, etc.) and I have a company that prints them up and drop ships them to my clients for me. I am trying to set up shipping options on my website for the customers to choose from but have ran into a problem. I had planned on using the UPS shipping module and inputting the weights of each individual print product but I am unable to get this information from the company. There advice was to go on their website after my customer orders, place the order, use their shipping calculator and then let my customer know what the shipping costs will be. This will not work because when the customer goes on my website to place their order they are not going to want to wait until I get a hold of them with the shipping costs. I really need to come up with a solution pretty quick and I would really appreciate any help that you guys can give me. I thought that I would just use a flat rate shipping price that varies from product to product and is also based on how many the product that they order.

Here's how the ordering process goes on my website: The customer selects what type of product they want such as postcards. They then select how many they would like to order (from 100 - 20,000). At the checkout screen I would like to give them 3 shipping options: ground, 3-day and next day all with different prices.

Ideally I would like to just be able to go and assign Postcards-quantity of 100 a flat shipping rate of $10 for ground $20 for 3 day and $30 for next day air, Postcards-quantity of 1000 a flat shipping rate of $20 for ground, $30 for 3 day, and $40 for next day air and so on. I would then do this for all of the different print products that I sell. So far I have not found a way to do this.

How would I go about setting up this up? Thanks in advance for any help you guys can give me.

Unless I don't understand the situation, it sounds like your supplier just doesn't want to provide the weight on each individual order. I have to believe they would tell you how much a given quantity of any particular item weighs (or a close estimate). So, if 100 postcards weighs 8 ounces, then 1000 would weigh 5 pounds, etc. Then, you could set things up by weight - much simpler, and the way UPS charges for their service.

That's what I was hoping they would do. You'd think that they would have the weights written down somewhere. Another problem might be that they ship from 2 different facilities which are in California and Ohio so the shipping estimate wouldn't always be accurate.

My solution was to go on their website and for each product and its quantity, do a shipping estimate for a state on the opposite coast such as Vermont, and use that quote for my flat rate shipping price. This way I will always have the shipping covered. But like I said, I have no idea how to set up flat rates for each individual product and its different quantities.

But like I said, I have no idea how to set up flat rates for each individual product and its different quantities.
Flat rate is just that - One rate no matter what is ordered.

As you have attempted to work around this by using their site's estimator - You can expand upon this to try to get an incremental increase.

What you have had estimated is some qty to some location, mentally assign some unit(weight) to your initial estimates say 1lb.

Now use their estimator and estimate this X2, X5, & X10

Plot the shipping difference and determine a factor

Use ZenCart's table rate by weight and create the table

In the cart products, make the weight 1lb for one unit purchased