Shipping Feature Request to help with shipping: Need Size & Cubic Inches of Product

Technical Q&A
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1

We ship many different items: different sizes, Weights, and quantities, and as we increase our daily shipping, we are doing everything we cna to streamline the process. It is already a little difficult, and as we grow, we hope to see it get worse due to increased sales and more shipping.

What I am hoping for is some more comprehensive shipping assistance built into Shopify.
Even if this is something that could be added to larger stores, as an upgrade or included in the more comprehensive Shopify plans.

We need a few tweaks: I understand this is not necessarily easy, but it would be amazingly helpful and streamline shipping when multiple different items are involved.

1.) In the product listing, a place to enter the product dimensions as it would be shipped: the
Length, Width, and Height. This is different than the actual product size; sometimes there is extra packaging, etc. The user would enter this and could even include extra dimensions for any known padding or protection needed to ship an item.

2.) Have the system then use these three dimensions to calculate a total Cubic Inches for shipping the product.

3.) When adding boxes to the shipping setup, also have a spot for the system to calculate the total Cubic inches of the boxes; the dimensions are already entered.

4.) When shipping and creating a shipping label, if more than one item is selected, use the total cubic inches of the products selected for shipping and compare that to the boxes available and suggest the proper box size, anr/or notify that the shipment will need to be split.

I think this describes everything ( LOL) that would be required… Easy Peasy ( LOL )
Hope you will consider it…

4

I agree this would be very useful as a native Shopify feature, especially for stores shipping mixed-size items.

At the moment, Shopify products/variants have weight and SKU, but there is not really a simple native length Ă— width Ă— height field that flows all the way through checkout and packing logic. A common workaround is to store packed dimensions in product or variant metafields, for example length, width, height, and optionally extra padding.

From there, a shipping-rate app or custom carrier-service logic can calculate cubic volume, compare it against configured box sizes, and decide whether the order fits one box or needs to be split. That can help produce more accurate checkout rates for bulky or mixed-cart orders.

The main limitation is that this helps mostly with checkout rate calculation. It may not fully solve the Shopify admin label-purchase workflow unless the fulfilment/label process also reads the same dimension data.

So I agree with the feature request. Native product shipping dimensions + box-fitting logic inside Shopify would be ideal, but metafields plus calculated shipping logic can be a practical workaround today.

5

Thanks for the idea of a workaround… Just way over my head to try to figure out.

6

Hi @TravelingBags .

Hope you are having a great day!

Yeah, that’s a great idea, apps like ShipStation and Pirateship already do this today,
like dimensions, box suggestions, slip shipments,
while Shopify catches up!