Introduction

A shipping unit is a value used by LabelEd to calculate packaging and shipping costs for orders.

Depending on the type of items your company ships, you may wish to think of shipping units like a unit of size or weight. A LabelEd shipping unit basically incorporates both of these things.

Packaging

The LabelEd administration area allows you to set up an unlimited number of packages. You can give these packages a custom name, and among other things, you must set a maximum shipping unit value for each package.

Think of a package as a small envelope, an A4 envelope, a small parcel, larger parcel, etc, etc. Obviously the types of packages that you use to ship depends entirely on the types of items that you are selling.

But in any case, when creating your packages, the shipping unit value should be equal to the maximum number of units that each package can hold.

Items

So, now when creating your product items, you specify the number of shipping units that each item takes up.

Orders

With all of this information, LabelEd can then total up the unit count of all items in a customer's order and assign a suitable package, or number of packages that will accommodate all of the items in the order. If more than one package is required, LabelEd will automatically attempt to group the items together so that the order can be shipped in the lowest number of packages possible. Once all of the required packages have been calculated, LabelEd can then provide the customer with an exact shipping cost based on the prices of all of your packages with each available courier.