Fix Box Definitions When They’re Too Small for An Item

Overview

You have defined dimensions on your products as well as shipping boxes. All boxes are available to all products. The order is packing into one small box when in reality you know it would have to pack into one medium box.

Example

In this example these boxes are defined:

Small – 5″ x 5″ x 5″
Medium – 7″ x 7″ x 7″,
Large – 10″ x 10″ x 10″

There are two 2″ x 2″ x 2″ products in the cart.

The order is being packed into the small box, because as you can see from the box dimensions and the items dimensions, it should fit.

In reality, because the items have abnormal shapes or perhaps require extra packing materials the order should be packed into the medium box.

Solution

There’s two approaches we can take here, and it depends on what the majority of the products you sell are.

Option 1: Most of my products need extra packing or are oddly shaped

In this case you should set the default box packing tolerance. It can be found in your ShipperHQ dashboard under Advanced Features -> Dimensional Packing -> Settings -> Advanced -> Default Box Tolerance. I’d recommend starting at 20% and working from there.

Option 2: A few of my products need extra packing or are oddly shaped

If you’re using Magento, you can use the product attribute ship_box_tolerance to set the tolerance at the product level.

If you’re using a different eCommerce platform you can either pad out the dimensions of those few products, or you will need to use the method from option 1.

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