Shipping Question For Art Store Owners.

Hi art store owners or anyone else,

I’m scratching my head over the packaging of my art work and how to set up my cart and what to do for tare weight.

Ok let’s say you have an 8x10 (or whatever) piece of paper – this is fine art paper so it’s not that easy to roll but is doable – although I have yet to try it – will be doing a test run shortly

Regardless of whether I do it flat or rolled doesn’t matter for a SINGLE piece - the weight and the shipping is the same at 1 piece.

Now since I sell my art unframed, it’s easy two put 1 – 10 art papers into the same shipping container – if a flat packaging option is chosen for my shipping needs. The actual cost of shipping the extra art is negligible.

How to best set up my cart? Any ideas?

I'm in the same position.. I have a Giclee print shop, and we're putting our local artists online. I just haven't figured out the shipping yet.

Do I just setup a straight % for shipping? Do I do a table rate? 10% up to $100, %5 percent for orders over $100 ? I think that would work better than trying to figure tare weight for pieces of paper.

With the smaller prints, under 22 inches, I would want to ship them flat. The larger ones will need to be rolled. Our paper comes on rolls, and as long as they're protected and not mistreated, our ink won't crack.

Or maybe you just set a straight $ amount for shipping an entire order, regardless of size/weight. Sure, you might eat some cost on the larger orders.. but generally you'll have more total money on that order as well.

We also do canvas prints. And if they need to be stretched, then shipping will be more for us.

Ahhh.. the joys of Art.

-Mark

Use Advanced Shipper from Ceon..not free but will save hours of time and troubles...

Is it good? Works well? Easy to configure etc?

Ok have sent them an email it's basically like this - perhaps you can also tell me if it works for this or if there is another solution:

Ok I have a number of different shipping issues – just so you can figure it out better as to what I’m asking:

Issue 1

Take 1 sheet of paper – this represents my artwork
Put that piece of paper on top of something else – this represents the packaging for the above item
Take a 2nd sheet of paper – now this piece of paper will fit inside # 2 above etc, etc for additional pieces of paper.

So here’s the issue.

The first piece of art will require packaging – it always will - however due to the nature of the product I can easily fit in a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, piece of art into the same package thus saving my client money in shipping costs – extra packaging isn’t needed because it all fits together. I can adjust or would need to adjust the weight by a couple of grams to facilitate the extra pieces of artwork.

Can the software do this? Assign base weight for the 1st, then assign just the weight of the add ons as needed? Of course there would have to be a maximum value reached – at that point a 2nd shipping container would have to be used. Can the software do this too?

Issue 2

Ok, so now you have all of your nice pieces of artwork packed up and ready to go above and now you want to pack your phone, Christmas cards – 5 singles and 3 – Fivepacks (5 of the same card in one package) packed into another package, envelope, whatever. The price would then have to be calculated for these other items.

Then

Issue 1 and Issue 2 would then have to be totalled together so a base shipping price could be determined.

Now what I would like to do is to offer my client’s a choice when it comes to shipping options

Option A – Canada Post, Option B – UPS

Then once they have selected their items and their shipping choice – I’d like to have it spit out a final price.

Hi and HELP!!

Still working on my shipping thing – it’s proving to be downright tricky – sending some emails back and forth with the ceon people trying to figure out a solution but can anyone tell me the following:

How do you think it should be configured? I mean isn’t this sort of the same as other products? i.e. 5 small items fit into one big box. If you had 1 item it would be 1 box, but if you had 5 items it still could be into 1 shipping box?

How do some of you have your stores set up?

OK - juts in case anyone was interested.

I ended up adding the packaging weight per item to the acutal wieght of the item for sale.

It's the only solution I could come up with and by adding the wieght in per item I no longer have to worry about size, dimensions, etc, etc.

Depending upon the art and destination, it may be better to provide a manual quote:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=480

Thanks for the link