With Shiptastic you can (automatically) create shipments for orders. Perhaps you are wondering why you need an additional data record for each order? Quite simple: It is quite plausible that in your everyday store either an order does not fit into a single package, so that you need several packages (or shipments) or you only have part of the order in stock and split the order into shipments so that the customer receives part of his shipment early.
Structure of a shipment
A single shipment contains various information:
- Dimensions, i.e. length, width and height
- Weight of the contents
- Status (e.g. processing or shipped)
- Packaging
- Total weight (weight of packaging + weight of contents)
- Shipping provider
- Items contained (again with dimensions and weights)
When a new shipment is created, most of the information is stored automatically, i.e. the weights and dimensions of the individual items are used to determine the total weight and the available packaging. In addition, the shipping method stored for the order is used to determine which shipping provider is suitable for this shipment.
Shipment list
Under WooCommerce > Shipments you will find a comprehensive list of your shipments. You can filter the shipments according to a specific order or perform a search. You can also filter by a specific date range. Management is similar to orders. You can use this list to see which shipments need processing and which shipments have already been shipped.
You can use multiple actions to assign a new status to any number of shipments. If you use a shipping provider integration, you can also create and download multiple labels at the same time.
Packaging
Packaging is an important concept in Shiptastic – the information about your available packaging is used in many places in the plugin – it is important that you store this information and keep it up to date. Packaging is used to automatically pack shipments as well as when creating and calculating shipping rules. In addition, available packaging (suitable or not suitable) is displayed when creating and managing shipments so that you do not have to think about which packaging is suitable for this particular shipment.
Shipping service providers
You can select a shipping service provider for each shipment. Shipping service providers can either be managed manually (you can create your own shipping providers and store certain settings, e.g. a tracking link or a tracking description) or connected via an integration. Shipping service providers that are connected via an integration support, for example, the (automatic) creation of labels for shipments. Some integrations also support the selection of a pick-up station by your customers in the checkout.
Create a shipment manually
On the Edit order page, you can create new shipments and manage available shipments for the order. It is important to know that shipments are always kept in sync with orders, i.e. you can only add the items that are contained in the corresponding order to a shipment. If a shipment already exists that contains all (dispatchable) items, no further (partial) shipment can be created. Instead, you must delete individual items from the existing shipment – then you can create another shipment, which in turn contains the items that not exist in another shipment. It is even better to activate the automatic packing feature – in that case Shiptastic will automatically split the order into several packages when creating a shipment if the order does not fit into one of your available packages.
Automation
To minimize the administrative effort as much as possible, you may choose to automatically create shipments to orders by selecting certain order statuses that trigger the automation logic.
How it works
So that your customers may not face longer loading times, e.g. in the checkout, Shiptastic automatically creates shipments via the asynchronous WooCommerce Action Scheduler. This action scheduler is supplied by WooCommerce and is used to outsource certain time-consuming processes to the background.
You can view the current tasks of the scheduler under WooCommerce > Status > Scheduled actions (separate tab). You can use the search function to view all actions relating to shipment scheduling and check whether there are any problems with the processing of actions. Simply enter the search term shipments. In the Pending tab, you can see the actions that are still pending. Theoretically, you can also execute the actions manually via the Execute link – but this should not be necessary.
If you notice problems with the processing of the actions, i.e. there are many failed actions or your actions are all in pending status, there seem to be problems with the WP Cron in your setup. One problem is, for example, the directory protection of the store (e.g. in test environments). The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin also uses this action scheduler in many places. In the documentation you will find a lot of useful information on error handling of the WooCommerce Action Scheduler (which uses WP Cron in the background).
Notification of the customer
To keep your customers informed about the status of the shipment, Shiptastic provides an email notification that is sent when the shipment status changes to shipped. In this notification, the customer will find general information about the shipment, as well as an option to track the shipment, e.g. via a link to the shipping provider if available.
In addition to the e-mail notification, Shiptastic also embeds the created shipments on the my account page.