Products with Variations

Overview

With ShipperHQ, it is possible to associate different shipping criteria to a product and its children. For example: you may have a configurable product such as a Bike which has different size wheels. Based on what wheel size, the customer selects you may wish to pack in different box sizes.

By default, ShipperHQ will be looking at the parent’s attributes.

The option to use Parent attributes over Child attributes is not supported within BigCommerce. This is due to how BigCommerce sends each product as stand alone item, meaning ShipperHQ will only see the variant product’s attributes if they are present within a request.

Parent/Child Relationship

Looking at the Bike example, you can see that we would want to associate the shipping attributes to the child products so we can get the sizes. In other scenarios, say t-shirts with different colors/sizes the box and rules may all be the same, so we would want to associate the shipping attributes with the parent.

Product attributes defined on the parent/child that affect shipping include, but are not limited to:

  • Shipping group
  • Origin
  • Dimensions

Other attributes can vary based on the e-commerce platform.

Configuration Options

By default, ShipperHQ looks at the attributes defined on the parent product, regardless of the attributes defined by the child products. The exception is the weight. To change this:

  1. In your ShipperHQ Dashboard, click Websites from the Basic Setup section.
  2. Click your website from the Websites table.
  3. Click the Advanced tab.
  4. Untick the Use Parent for Attributes checkbox.

This option makes the attributes defined on the child products to ignore those defined on the parent product.

Shopify NB: if the option to use parent is ticked, the option to edit the shipping properties does not show the product variants. Unticking the option show the variants.

Example

A product in the cart has been configured with the following options:

Parent: Light

Shipping group: none

Child: 10-bulb

Shipping group: LARGE-LIGHT

Child: 4-bulb

Shipping group: MEDIUM-LIGHT

When the Use Parent option is selected, and the 10-bulb light is in the cart no shipping group is assigned. If Use Parent is unselected, the shipping group is set to LARGE-LIGHT. You can then setup rules around this, e.g. surcharge large lights by $3, medium by $2.

Bundle products

Bundle products in Magento are treated the same way as configurable (parent/child) products – the parent is attribute are looked it if the option is ticked on the website settings and the vice versa happens if the that option is ticked and the system in that case looks at the attributes that makes up the bundle (products within it.)

Virtual Products

You can ignore virtual products, this is set up at a Website level under advanced options. They then won’t be included in any rule calculations e.g. price based rules, etc. Generally virtual products are not shipped, but we have seen cases where they can be hence this option.

Custom Options

In Magento, there are custom options for products. No shipping data can be attached to these options as attributes cannot be assigned to them.

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