How do I keep shipping charges from piling up too high?

[RobbieHembco]

We ship items  from our website, and often have to refund the customer money for large orders because the way that shipping charges are estimated through PayPal don't account for the fact that you can often ship 2 or 3 of the same item in the same box.  For example, item A, B, and C all cost $5 to ship individually, if someone buys 3 of item A, PayPal will  still only charge $5, which is correct because we can fit 3 A's into the same box.  However, if someone buys 1 of each A, B, and C, it will charge them $15, when really we can fit all 3 of those in the same box.  $10 dollars may not seem too extreme, but this happens on larger scales and shipping  fees start to rack up to $70 when really it only costs about $13 to ship the order.  Refunding customers is easy enough, but we are obviously losing sales when people have to be able to spend  $50 more than they anticipated just so they can complete the transaction and then get refunded immediately. 

Alternatively, if someone orders 150 of item A, it will theoretically still only charge $5, which is also a problem.  Are there options to adjusting shipping charges that I'm unaware of?  We use USPS Standard shipping boxes which are always the same price regardless of weight.  Therefore weight is not an issue, only size and space.

Thanks You

Robbie @ Hembco

[Trish_M]

I was just researching this today too.

There is a way to set up a "rate table" both the Domestic and International payments.

This is found under Profile > More Options > Selling Prefs > Set up Shipping Calculations.

[RobbieHembco]

Thanks for the reply

I've tried this already and wasn't able to really address the problem I was explaining.  I suppose the only solution is to use item weight?

Is there a way to let people  place an order, but we have to check in and finalize the order and then apply the shipping charge to the customer?  I would make it a slower, more complicated checkout, but would also be a much more accurate shipping price, seeing as how we could first review the order,  and easily determine the price to ship based on the items ordered.

Is there a way similar to this?

[brewhardware]

You probably should be applying weights to each item and setting up multiple tiers in the shipping profiles. There are actually two things Paypal can and should do to make this work better. First, there has to be a way to apply a single FIXED weight to each transaction to account for box and packing materials. After that, the items purchased would have their own weight. That's the bare minimum requirement to support either better estimated shipping or accurately calculated actual shipping.

[RobbieHembco]

Thanks, I may have to end up setting up profiles for weight, though the way we ship using priority flat-rate boxes, weight is not an issue, just size.  It's nice when shipping multiple orders, because you do not have to calculate shipping for every purchase.  Anything that fits in the box ships for the same price.  There are different sized flat rate boxes which determines the price, but the weight doesn't matter.

Anyways, this is how we've always performed phone-order shipping, and we are trying to intergrate our new webstore into this same method.

For the developers out there:

One idea I'm having is to create a beta-shopping cart using PHP, where people can select what they want entirely on our website, and then using PayPal only for the final transaction.  I imagine this will get much more technical than just copying and pasting button code into html, but is this possible with the right coding?  Does PayPal integrate with custom shopping carts like this?