Shipping cost - by weight or price?

Taz Bricks

Hi All,

Just a quick question if someone has a little bit of time to help :)

1. What would be recommended, to setup the shipping cost by weight or by price?
2. If I setup by weight, do I need to manually add the weight for each item in my inventory? When I look in the catalog for certain item it shows the weight in Details. But if I add the item to my inventory, the weight tab is empty.

Thanks in advance!

Taz

robernat

@"Taz Bricks" Best way to setup shippingbands is by weight and by entering packaging sizes (from experiance and based on your shippers limitations). Substract your 'package' weight from the weight of your shippers shipping band.
You do not need to add weights in your store, BO holds weight for most items, you can check your inventory for missing ones and enter them on BO (so available site wise for all sellers). Your personal weight field is in most cases only usefull for used sets (without box and/or instruction for example) as the weight will be lower compared to a sealed set (of which the weight data is in the database) and potentially incomplete minifigs (can be ignored just as well).
When your buyers create a cart, BO will automaticly calculate 'volume' of the cart and compare it to your stores dimensions (and weightband) options to fit it 'in' your shippingbands, quite easy, works pretty flawless (unless an item has no known dimensions or weight, in that case BO uses an algorithm with a theoretical volume and weight).
You might wanna check if another seller in your country 'shares' shippingoptions, in that case you can simply copy them, tune them for yourself and you'll be set.

Calibrick

What helped me also (I have a setup similar to what Robertnat shares, above) was to actually look at the publicly-shared shipping bands accessible from your store's shipping setup area - it just helped me to visualize what mine could look like.

And don't forget to either a) incorporate some kind of padding into your costs (e.g., for 1 oz orders setup charges for 1.5 ounces) for your packaging, or b) increase the part weight in your inventory by some percentage and use for the store-unique part weight field. b) isn't difficult if you have Excel and import your content as XML, but I have no doubt a) is more common (certainly simpler, cosmically).

Also, don't forget anticipated packaging size. In the US, first class shipping has a package size maximum, regardless of weight. This latter point is important for larger sets (and even very large LEGO pieces, such as a ship hull), as your packaging and any protective material (bubble, etc.) will of course be larger than the BO set size (and weight more, which Robert notes above).