How to Get Accurate Ship By Weight Cart Calculations

[Jenny]

Novice needs help. We are using template Shopsite Manager store (Version 10r.7), hosted by company with minimal customer support. Shipping for products is set up by weight for USPS first class and Priority Mail Domestic and International. Each individual product weighs less than 13 ounces. Shipping is correct on a per item basis up to the basic Priority Mail rate for domestic items. The problem is with large orders. No matter how many items ordered cart charges per item, collecting too much postage. Our product page contains ship by weight and the weight amount. We have taken the shipping weight table amounts out to try to cover large order. My question: Is is possible to have the cart recalculate large orders to the correct postage? If so, how? Any assistance greatly appreciated.

[robm]

Jenny,

See if you can upgrade to the latest version 11 of ShopSite. I believe v11 fixes a USPS issue where multiple products that are first class can inflate the priority mail prices by causing a separate shipping container for each item.

Rob

[Jenny]

Thanks so much. We will investigate this.

[Swine]

Having the same problem, I believe. Did version 11 clear this up? And if so, is V11 a free upgrade from 10?

[Jim]

Some changes were made to the USPS rate calculations in ShopSite 11.

You would need to talk to your host about upgrading and the cost involved to upgrade from version 10 to version 11. If your store is a monthly leased version generally the upgrade would be at no cost as far as ShopSite is concerned but your host may charge a fee for doing it.

If you are not at a partner who offers the monthly leased version and/or you have a one time purchased license then there would be a fee for upgrading between versions. The cost for upgrading in this case is listed on http://www.shopsite.com/upgrade_pricing.html with different rates for Pro and Manager stores. Note that that the Version Upgrades table just for the upgraded software, if you need ShopSite to do the upgrade for you you need to also purchase the Upgrade Help or an Annual Support and Upgrade Contract.

[Jenny]

We did investigate upgrading to Version 11; however, our hosting site will not do so until it "evaluates the impact on all parties utilizing ShopSite stores". Upgrade is not viable for us now.

So far, we have created a shipping table to match USPS first class rates and are now adjusting (artificially) the weight of our products to get into a closer proximity of the chart shipping weights. This gets us closer to the actual USPS cost. We started with the actual weight in ounces, but we then had to round both the chart and the product to only two decimal points. (0.00) Now we are just increasing the product weight until we get within range of our actual shipping cost. We have had limited success with this with first class but priority mail is off approximately two to three dollars or more on large orders. We ship Priority Mail to continental US, Alaska/Hawaii, Canada/Mexico and International.

We have spent seven months trying to fix this problem for only 9 products that all weigh less than one pound. An alternate shipping method is not possible for our products. We must use USPS. We have tried connecting directly with USPS which did not produce a satisfactory customer experience.

I would want to know exactly how Version 11 addresses these and other issues before I upgraded.

[Jim]

The easiest way to see how ShopSite 11 handles USPS shipping for your products is to use a demo store. You can get one here. http://ademostore.com/cgi-bin/ssdemos/start.cgi?demo=store&storename=evaluate . Setup the USPS shipping using your account settings. Create a product with the appropriate weight that you are having issues with, configure package settings, etc and assign it to a page. Then publish and add the product to the cart. You should then be able to see the rates returned by USPS for various quantities.

Note: You could download your pages and products under Utilities > Database > Download and in the demo store upload them so you have the same pages and products (minus images).

I believe one change that was made was to consolidate items weighing less than 13 oz into a single first class package. Once the weight exceeds 13 oz the first class option would no longer be displayed and the rate would change to Priority mail. You can confirm that in a demo store.

[Jenny]

Thanks so much for the information. As soon as we finish our shipping issues, we will definitely take a look at a ShopSite 11 demo store.