Default Package Lack of Options Prevents Accurate Shipping Charges

[AppleSauce999]

To my knowledge there is no way to account for customer buying different sized items from your store and retrieving an accurate rate from USPS.

USPS Ground Adv and Priority Mail are based on Volume and Weight.

You can get an accurate weight for the order, but you cannot get an accurate volume when there is more than one item.

Shopify forces you to choose a default box, but forget box, its really a default volume.  

What if shopify forced you to  use a default weight?   Its the exact same thing.

What if shopify based all your shipping charges based on 4 lbs?

Shopify drops the ball in a lot of areas, but this one is inexcusable.   

USPS weight and volume is new, but shopify has just refused to address it.   This is a change that forces most businesses to drop all dynamic carrier rates, unless you can eat the difference on larger orders.   

My default box was 8x6x4 a customer bought 100 items and chose Priority Mail coast to coast.  He paid $12.  The cost based on weight and volume was $48.   It was half the profit on the order.   We sell anywhere from 1 to 500 items per order.   We cannot accurately plan for this with shopify.   How can we use 1 default box when customers order this wide range of volume?   What default box should I choose?   The solution is to eat the loss on the larger orders, but why should I have to do this?  

Support basically says 'You have to do the best you can."   

How are people addressing this?

Even if you set up profiles for every volume of items, you cannot account for a customer buying multiple items.   

You can set the default to a large box, but your customers will think you are overcharging for shipping.  

Im hoping someone will call me an idiot and show me how this is easily address.

[UjjawalS]

hi @AppleSauce999 We have addressed this issue in our application - Multi-Carrier Shipping Label app. So we started with adding the dimensions functionality where you can add dimensions to the products and it helps simplify the volume issue. Additionally, the app offers different packing methods that allow control over how items are grouped into boxes. Lastly, since the app handles dimensions, it can also calculate the dimensional weight, similar to the carriers, and help get accurate rates for shipping single or multiple products.

I would recommend you give it a shot and try the app (with a 14 days free trial) to understand how it handles dimensions & dimensional weight and calculates the rates accurately.