AusPost Shipping Calculator

[joshl_1995]

Hello DaniWeb Community,
I'm making an online store and am wanting make a way to calculate the shipping the way I've got it at the moment is using this. However, it isn't good for multiple items. So if one item is $10 and another (smaller) item is $5, so the total is (obviously) $15. Only thing is, you could probably fit both items in a satchel and only have to pay the $10 (or so).
So how do I go about doing this? like how do other online stores do it? I would rather not have customers pay for more then what the shipping is worth (example a customer could buy $50 worth of small items that could fit in one box but would be charged one box/satchel per item).

[diafol]

I would imagine that you need to calculate the dimensions of the products and see if they fit into standard boxes. The weight may also be an issue, so you may need to know those. If sending many products at once, then this could get really complicated. In addition, some products (e.g. fragile) may require additional inter-product packaging. If you assume all your packages are cuboid or can be made cuboidal, then that may simplify matters. Maybe look at some packing algorithms? This is beyond me though.

[joshl_1995]

I've thought of all these different way like as you said size and the way they could be packed, but how do I calculate it in the box? like all along side each other, stacked? This is the difficult part, AusPost really need to step up. Like their API is all over the place, if I could be bothered and had the time I was going to make an API attachment to "prettify" it.

[rproffitt]

Just in case you want to know more. Amazon has been working on such apps for years. There are folk that forget that such software is currently not open source so Fedex, Amazon and other companies have software teams on this topic. Once in a while a person new to this wants the codes. So far, nope.