Calculating Freight/Shipping costs

[Borvik]

I'm working on a new e-commerce site for my company, and need some advice on calculating the freight/shipping costs.

The difficulty is not utilizing FedEx or UPS web services to return costs.

The problem is that the calculators require weight to calculate and we have a massive database of products. While some have a weight - most do not, and this makes calculating the freight/shipping costs more difficult.

What do you guys think it the best way to calculate freight in the absence of weight and dimensions?

(I know not strictly a PHP question, but I wasn't sure where else to post it)

 

[vacunita]

If you don't have weight or dimensions, its going to be impossible to calculate the cost of shipping.

Its like trying to figure out how many steaks to buy for a dinner party, but you don;t knwo the size of the steak or how many people are coming.

The best you can do is have a default amount of steaks and hope its enough to feed everybody.

If you have at the very least dimensions: width, height, and length you can calculate an object's dimensional weight as established by several shipping companies. And then calculate the cost of shipping it based on that weight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_weight

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Phil AKA Vacunita
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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Borvik]

Thanks Phil,

I guess I'm not looking for a true calculation, but rather an estimate.

Though the info about Dimension weight is helpful, I've added that as another check.

Right now I have it checking for (returning the first one it finds):
Shipping Weight
Weight
Dimensional Weight

Though I'm not sure what to do after that - the typical customer expects to see something right?

 

[lgarner]

Some firms charge shipping based on price. It's hardly a true indicator of the shipping cost, but apparently it's representative enough that they can live with it.