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@englishrosegardens wrote:

 

 

I've bought a lot of stock from websites that don't calculate the postage when I buy.  They over-estimate the postage and charge me that amount if I use paypal, then they manually refund the excess through paypal when they do the order (same as I used to do if someone paid straight away before ebay started charging fees on postage).  If I pay by credit card they put the correct postage amount in when they process the order and charge it to my card. 

 

Some are able to get the actual cost pretty close but a lot don't.  For a really large order they may change the type of packaging they use, but they won't know this until they actually pack the order.  Sometimes items may be the same general size but take up less space.  As an example, imagine trying to work out how many dresses fit in a certain sized satchel - they may all be the same size generally, but some could be lighter and bulkier than others and less would fit.  Sometimes it just isn't worth a seller's time to try and work out all the different combinations for posting.

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I do understand all that, but sometimes it's more a case of the limitations of the carts they're using than what they are or are not prepared to do, and once the basic metrics are implemented, every time a seller adds a new product, they would only need to get the packed weight and volume once for each product, so it would be a matter of determining wether doing that and eliminating the after-sale processes of finding what size packages are required, what to charge etc invoicing and/or refunding overages is worth the time spent on assessing the products up front.