Step Control and Shipping

Dear team,

First of all – thank you for the great plugin, guys! Keep up the good job!

I’m experiencing some difficulties related to the Step Control option of the plugin and its interaction with the shipping functionality of WooCommerce.

To be more specific, I’m working on an online shop for HORECA products – porcelain, pottery, glassware, cutlery, bar equipment, etc. All these items sell in steps depending on the original packaging from the manufacturer (for example: 6 forks, 6 plates, 12 beer glasses, 36 whiskey glasses, etc.)

Users should see the price per single item (1 fork, 1 plate, 1 beer glass, 1 whiskey glass, you name it). The step control is doing a great job as far as prices and quantities sold are concerned. How does it interfere with the shipping functionality of WooCommerce, though? What kind of information will it provide the system regarding weight and dimensions? Have you thought about that?

I would say it is all quite specific, especially in my case. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Beer glasses sell in 12-packs, therefore both minimum quantity and step must be set to 12. Let us assume I input the weight, length, width and height of a single product. The system can easily calculate the weight of the step being sold to the customer – 12 x weight of one beer glass (only inaccuracy will occur due to the lack of information regarding the weight of the packaging material itself).

Problem comes with dimensions. 12 beer glasses are packed in a 4 x 3 setup, so total package dimensions would be:

(4 x length of one beer glass) x (3 x width of one beer glass) x height of one beer glass

Unfortunately, there is no easy way of sharing that information with the website.

Whiskey glasses, however, are being sold in packs of 32 items – 4x4x2 (two horizontal layers of 16 whiskey glasses). Again, the system is likely to calculate the weight (except for the weight of the packaging material), but how would it handle dimensions of this packaging?

Thinking about this problem, a quick and valid workaround would be being able to input weight and dimension values for the full step (for example: dimensions for a pack of 32 whiskey glasses, not for just one of them). If that was the case, however, the platform should “know” it should multiply those dimension values by the number of steps (or packs) the customer orders.

I hope my explanations are clear enough for you to understand what the issue is. I would like to know what are your thoughts and comments on it. Looking forward to hearing from you with further info.

Best regards,
Angel Stankov