Usage example
Let’s assume you are running the furniture shop and selling mostly the chairs, desks and the desk accessories for better workspace organization. You’ve assigned the matching shipping classes (Chairs, Desks and Accessories) to all the products in your shop and configured the packages the way described above. You’ve also defined the shipping cost calculation rules according to your needs using the Flexible Shipping PRO plugin:
Each chair for the safety reasons needs to be shipped in a separate package. As you can see the shipping cost for the products with Chairs was configured to be $20, $30 for Desks and $5 for Accessories.
Results
Let’s now add the products to the cart and check how the whole setup works at the front.
When the customer puts the products with the Desks and Accessories shipping class into the cart, they are shipped together as a one shipment (Default package) and their combined shipping cost amounts to $35 ($5 coming from the rule #1 for shipping the Accessories + $30 from the rule #3 for shipping the Desks):
However, if the customer adds the products with the Chairs and Desks shipping classes to the cart, the shipment is splitted into 2 separate packages – the Default package with Desks and the Separate package for shipping chairs with Chairs, since the Chairs were defined as the shipping class which requires to be sent separately. Their combined shipping cost amounts to $50 ($30 coming from the rule #3 for shipping the Desks + $20 from the rule #2 for shipping the Chairs):
