IQComputing Alex

Hello @robersw

Per your description, it sounds like you’re not looking to use ShipStation for shipping estimates and want to define your own flat rate pricing. This plugin is meant to work exclusively with ShipStation to retrieve shipping estimates based on their provided services. You can rename services, add upcharges to services, and add upcharges to the boxes as well. There are also options to ship specifically based on weight to skip dimensions.

WooCommerce does have hooks to manage the package rates before they are displayed to the user if you are development savvy. You may be able to use the woocommerce_package_rates filter hook to modify the returned rates. We also have included in this update hooks to manage the API package requests before they are sent to ShipStation via iqlrss/shipping/packages . This passes both the packed items from plugin and the cart packages to loop through and repackage for custom usecases (such as this sounds to be).

As an alternative, could you create various Flat Rate shipping options for your Shipping Zones? The base ShipStation for WooCommerce plugin would continue to export your Orders to ShipStation (if you still need ShipStation integration).

Hello @robersw

We wanted to let you know that we have published an update to the plugin which adds Custom Package Presets for USPS, UPS, and FedEx to choose from. We’ll keep this thread open a bit longer in case you run into any issues or have any questions!

Unfortunately, after looking into this, I wasn’t able to find a way to do this.

WooCommerce relies on static Class Names for defining Shipping Methods. Throughout the WooCommerce plugin, they call new $shippingMethod() which prevents us from separating out the different Shipping Services into their own Shipping Methods. I tried to play around with spl_autoload() and class_alias() to try and “trick” WooCommerce into thinking it was loading a different Shipping Method that inherits the base Shipping Method class, but each time it came up short.

For us to separate our Shipping Services into separate Shipping Methods, WooCommerce would need to modify how they instantiate Shipping Methods, either by passing in an array of args, additonal args, or by creating a centralized place where the Shipping Methods get instantiated (and have the necessary hooks).

We’re open to suggestions, ideas, or routes to explore but after the above research, I’m going to resolve this ticket for now as “not planned”.

@robersw Hello!

This is a tough one. Conditional Shipping for WooCommerce bases it’s conditional logic on Shipping Methods, but this ShipStation implementation is a single Shipping Method which pulls from all the selected ShipStation carriers. The Carriers are connected via ShipStation, not directly to WooCommerce. You could create multiple ShipStation Shipping Methods based on Shipping Zones then select the specific Carrier Serivces to query, but to make each Carrier it’s own Shipping Method based on API callbacks (since all the Carrier connections live _on_ ShipStation) may prove to be difficult and cumbersome.

Maybe a dynamic Shipping Method could be created which inherits it’s calculation and packaging methods, but this is something we would need to explore in depth and would require an overhaul of the Shipping Method Class to allow dynamic creation based on the initial selected / supported carriers.

Maybe a more feasible solution would be to see if the Conditional Shipping for WooCommerce plugin has hook implementations which could be used to filter the rules and integrate the ShipStation Integration Settings.

These ideas are just off-the-cuff though and have not been explored in depth. We’ll keep an eye on this, and are open to ideas, but this feature will likely take a backseat to the Custom Packages and Label Creation features already planned.

@djmart177 While we do have a feature within the Integration Settings page to return only the lowest shipping rate – we do not currently have any sorting feature for returned rates.

That being said, we certainly see the benefit of a feature such as this and will look into how we can build this into a future release. We will keep this thread open and reply to it if/when this feature has been included so if you’re interested, please ensure to subscribe to topic replies here.

In the meantime, if you’re development savvy, WooCommerce does have a PHP filter hook in which you could modify the returned package rates woocommerce_package_rates

https://woocommerce.github.io/code-reference/files/woocommerce-includes-class-wc-shipping.html#source-view.387

Hello @robersw

Unfortunately, all the ShipStation carriers expect dimensions to return accurate rates.

Discussing this with the team, we feel that adding default, fallback, or global dimensions for products could cause more confusion than it helps and falls out of the scope of what we want this plugin to do.

That being said, WooCommerce does have a Product Export and Import feature where you could bulk update product dimensions fairly quickly. For more information on how you could utilize this, please refer to the WooCommerce documentation linked below:

https://woocommerce.com/document/product-csv-importer-exporter/

Alternatively, if you are development savvy, WooCommerce does have the necessary filter hooks to dynamically set the dimensions as needed. See WC_Product::get_prop() You could use the fitler hook supplied there on length, width, height, and weight to set default values for all your store products.

Hopefully you’re able to use one of the solutions above to resolve your usecase. If you have any further questions, comments, concerns, please reply back to this thead and we can assist further. Have a wonderful rest of your week!