Setup Guide

How Shipping Works

Let's say you ship to the US and Canada and your customer can select Priority Mail or Fedex Overnight. For the US Priority mail, for example, you charge $9.95 shipping and handling for the first item and $4.00 for each additional item. You'd have a matrix that looks like this:

When you link an item from your site to eComPal, one of the things that's specified in the link is "&weight=". This parameter tells the eComPal shopping cart what to calculate for shipping. You can have a &weight=0 parameter which tells the cart there's no shipping charge for the item. By the way, if you don't specify a weight parameter, the shopping cart adds one (1) to the total weight count of the shopping cart. So if you don't want shipping charged for an item, use the &weight=0 parameter.

eComPal calculates the shipping based on the sum of the weight parameters for the items ordered. 

Let's look at a couple of examples. I'm just going to use US Priority Mail for the example. The others work exactly the same way.

• One item, weight = 1. $9.95 will be charged.
• One item, weight = 1 and one item weight = 0. $9.95 will be charged
• Two items, weight = 1 for each, $13.95 will be charged ($9.95 for the first item and $4.00 for the second item).
• Five items, weight = 1 for each, $25.95 will be charged ($9.95 for the first item and $4.00 for each of the additional 4 items).
• Five items, weigh = 1 for three of them and weight = 0 for two of them, $17.95 will be charged ($9.95 for the first item, $4.00 each for the two items and $0 for the two 0 weight items).
• Two items, weight = 3 for the first item and weight = 2 for the second item. $25.95 will be charged ($9.95 + $8.00 for the first item and $8.00 for the second item).

By the way, there's a field with each of these lines that allows for free shipping on orders over a certain purchase amount. If an amount is entered in the field, let's say $100.00, if the total order is over that amount, the shipping will be free.