Shipping Weight of Multiple Small Lighweight Objects

[joseibarra]

Our site is mostly for Point of Sale systems and we have many small lightweight objects customers can order like replacement keys for cash drawers, cables, etc.

Of course a single cash drawer key or single cable doesn't weigh much but to be sure we don't get stung on shipping we might make the ship weight one pound which is overkill but we don't lose money on shipping.

The issue we would like to solve is if a customer orders 1 key and say Miva calculates the shipping cost to be $9.00 but if the customer orders 10 keys Miva thinks that must weigh 10 pounds so the shipping weight goes to $37.00 when of course 10 keys isn't going to weigh a whole lot more for shipping than one key.

If you were to take 10 keys to UPS for shipping that shipping cost would probably be about the same (or a little more) as the cost for shipping one key (if they calculate by weight).

Any ideas how to handle shipping multiple lightweight products so Miva doesn't just multiply the weight to be X times the weight of one lightweight product?

[kocourek]

There are a few options in MIVA for tweaking your shipping rates, and how you tweak those settings is highly dependent on how your rates are calculated.

You can add a fixed or percentage-based rate adjustment on a method-by-method basis within the Shipping Method Rules.

You could add a handling charge to all orders. The handling charge can be configured in many ways. https://docs.miva.com/reference-guide/shipping-settings You'd have to do some testing to determine how to get the rates you expect, but something as simple as a flat $X handling fee per order may work.

Each business has different needs, but "Garbage in, Garbage out" may apply here. Accurate product weights combined with a surcharge would allow the returned shipping rates to be accurate while providing the padding you need to cover your costs.

[joseibarra]

We have 35,000 products and this issue only applies to a small percentage so we need to be able to apply an adjustment to just those and not apply something like a surcharge to handling charge every product or every order in the store - and Miva will still want to multiply the shipping weight by 10 for this one example.

[Kent Multer]

For product weights, the Miva store allows two digits after the decimal point. Have you tried setting the individual product weights to something like 0.03 pounds (half an ounce)? What happened in that case?

If that doesn't work, I have a small utility module that can be used to adjust the weights during checkout, so that the total weight for the entire basket comes out to a smaller number.