Note: This issue is part of an effort to overhaul Ubercart shipping. See #1937764: Master Issue: Overhaul shipping.

For e-commerce software, packaging is the grouping of products into an order into packages. It is part of the fulfilment and shipping quote process.

Ubercart currently has only very basic packaging, and it is only used by certain shipping quote modules. As a result, it can't easily provide accurate shipping quotes for orders that have different kinds of products and require multiple boxes to ship. Also, there is currently no easy way to automate the back-end shipping process (fulfilment). So, it ends up being a time-consuming, labor-intensive, error-prone process.

So, Ubercart needs some form of automated packaging to improve quotes and fulfilment.

Note that it is not computationally feasible for a computer to figure out the best (most efficient) packaging for an arbitrary shipment of packages (the problem is NP-complete). However, it is possible to make reasonable approximations, which will be good enough for most purposes.

Some of the work is already done at http://drupal.org/project/packaging.

This matter is complex and needs some discussion first. Some questions that should be answered:

  • Should this be part of core Ubercart, or a separate module?
  • How much can modules shared by other carts be used?
  • If a store needs a custom packaging algorithm (heuristic), how can they add it?
  • How can it interface with quotes and fulfilment?
  • Does Ubercart need any other features to make this work (containers, etc.)?
  • What parameters should it use? Weight is obvious, but it could use dimensions, Rules conditions, etc.

Comments

TR’s picture

Version: 7.x-3.x-dev » 8.x-4.x-dev