Shipping Services – Same options for all zone showing

Hi,

Thank you for putting together all this feedback. It’s extremely helpful!

At the moment, the plugin shows all possible services and you’ll have to select the ones that makes sense for the shipping zone. But filtering out services that don’t make sense for the zone is a great idea. I’ll add it to our backlog for implementation.

The good news is that even if you select an international service in a USA zone, you should still never see international rates at check out (and vice-versa). The rates returned at check out are also filtered by the destination country/postcode/address.

in some tests adding products to cart, the USA zone has no international options, but it would bring up an international express rate even though it was unchecked. And the billing and shipping address were both USA.

Settings between different zones should be completely independent. So this definitely doesn’t sound right, and we’ll look into it. Any additional information you can provide about your setup (shipping zones and services selected) would be great, but you’ve already given us a lot of useful information to work with.

Cheers,

Nabeel (Code Wrangler @automattic)

Hi again,

I just wanted to let you know that I spend some time experimenting with multiple shipping zones and multiple instances of the USPS shipping method. I tried to reproduce a situation where settings from once instance interfered with a different instance but everything seemed to work correctly.

Since I haven’t heard from you, I’m going to set this issue to resolved for now. If you are still encountering this issue, we’ll gladly investigate further if you can provide some more specific instructions to reproduce. For example:

– Screenshots of the USPS and shipping zone settings you’re using
– Example addresses to try out at checkout (country/state/zip is sufficient)

Thanks!

Hello,

We are still struggling to get the plugin to return correct shipping rates. I have greatly reduced the shipping options and box sizes and the results are a little bit better, but I cannot get accurate shipping rates consistently.

Here are screen shots of the settings: and here is a screen shot of the box sizes:

I don’t know how to enable debugging so I can see which boxes the plugin chooses to pack the items and this would help to troubleshoot. Please let me know how to enable debugging.

When I run tests with domestic shipping, for single items the rates are close to what USPS charges for shipping the same items through their website, however, when multiple items are purchased, the rates are not calculated properly. In this example, there are two different DVDs and a 6 x 9 x 2 book 3 lbs.

When purchasing three of each DVD and two books, which could ship in a medium flat rate box, it returns a rate of: Flat Rate Priority Mail: $20.25, but if I add one more book, which would not fit in one medium flat rate box, it returns Flat Rate Priority Mail: $13.60

At this point we are not comfortable to put the products live, because we don’t want to lose money on shipping for domestic or overcharge the customer as I have seen in the international shipping, which I will show examples in the next post.

Here are screen shots of the settings for the international shipping: The box sizes and other shipping options are the same as for domestic.

Here are some examples of rates for Australia and Norway and how they differ between USPS and the cart.

This is shipping 6 DVDs and two books to Australia through the cart and the rate returned is $101.50 and here is 6 DVDs and 3 books to Australia through the cart and the rate returned is $87.34

Here is shipping 1 book through the cart to Australia and the rate returned is First Class Package $50.75 and here is the same first class package rate from USPS of $32.06

Here is 1 book rate through cart to Norway for $49.00 and here is the same 1 book first class package through usps for $32.78

As you can see the rates are not even close to USPS rates. We need to figure this out ASAP since we have many products waiting to be brought live, but the shipping plugin is not at all accurate.

Hello @myplenum!

I’m sorry that you’re experiencing issues with the plugin. Thanks for writing in and providing such great detail.

I don’t know how to enable debugging so I can see which boxes the plugin chooses to pack the items and this would help to troubleshoot. Please let me know how to enable debugging.

You can enable more verbose logging by going to WooCommerce > System Status > WooCommerce Services and clicking the “Debug Logging” toggle. Unfortunately, it won’t expose packaging data, since that is done on our servers.

You don’t need to define USPS Flat Rate boxes manually – if you’ve enabled a flat rate service (like Priority Mail - Small Flat Rate Box) the corresponding flat rate package is enabled transparently.

It appears that there may be some errors in our box packing locking – I’d like to look into that. Can you share the dimensions and weight of all the products you use in your examples?

Until I hear back, I will assume you’re using standard DVD cases sized 5.3″ x 7.5″ x 0.5″.

Jeff,

The book in the example is 6 x 9 x 2 @ 3 lbs and the DVDs are 5.25 x 5.25 x 0.125 @0.1375 lbs

Thanks for your help

It has been 9 days and no reply yet. We have hundreds of products to sell and thousands of people who want them and we are waiting to have a shipping solution that works so we can make the products available.

So far none of the shipping plugins have been capable of accurately calculating shipping rates.

There must be many people who are getting acceptable results, since there are not many similar questions in the support forum. If we are doing something totally wrong where could you point me for detailed setup instructions?

I have a lot of pressure to get the products live and I don’t know where to get the support I need.

If I can’t get support here, please direct me to a place I can.

Thanks

Hi again,

Sorry it took a while to get back to this. I just wanted to let you know that today I’ll be looking into this in more detail. I’ll let you know what we find.

In the meantime, could you let me know what other plugins you’ve tried? Do they have the same problem, or do they different problems than the ones you described above?

Thanks.

Hi Again,

I’ve spent some time looking into this and I believe there are several issues involved, so please be patient.

First, and as an initial warning, box packing calculations are extremely complex and difficult to program. We’re aware that our current algorithms are a little too simple and need more work. We are working on improving them, but this could take another month or more to complete, and even then they won’t be perfect (if you’ve ever ordered things from Amazon, I’m sure you’ve received some oddly packed boxed :-D).

That said, I do believe you can still get significantly better results than what you have shown above ??

I configured two products on my test store as follows:
– DVD: 5.25 x 5.25 x 0.125 inches @ 0.1375 lb
– Book: 6 x 9 x 2 inches @ 3 lb

Here are some domestic shipping results I got:
– 3 books and 6 DVDs: Flat Rate: Priority Mail: $13.60
– 4 books and 6 DVDs: Flat Rate: Priority Mail: $13.60
– 5 books and 6 DVDs: Flat Rate: Priority Mail: $27.20

Here are some international shipping results I got:
– 1 book to Australia: First-Class Package International Service: $33.75
– 2 Books to Australia: First-Class Package International Service: $67.50
– 3 Books to Australia: Flat Rate: Priority Mail International: $75.95

These results are very different from the ones you are getting, and I’m not 100% sure why. My first guess is that it has something to do with the custom boxes you have configured above. Could you try deleting them?

If you like, we can continue to troubleshoot this via more direct communication. You can reach me at (my first name) – a t – automattic (note the two T’s in -mattic).

Cheers,
Nabeel

@myplenum

This thread is being marked resolved due to inactivity.

Please don’t hesitate to open a new support thread if you need further assistance!