Automatically split items into shipments based on rules

Once again SS dropped the ball...

Did anyone find a workaround that doesn’t involve a separate website/app/Shipstation store integration?

Hey you all, 

I was looking through this thread and I believe this has been rolled out: https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/17465241673627-Automatically-Split-Orders

Please let me know if this isn’t the case. 

I would say it is partially complete. We still can’t split items based on automation rules. This effects products that are in bundles that may ship separately only in some cases. For example we sell a large number of products that are bundles with 4 items, 2 items within the bundle must ship in a long tube (96x2x2) and the other two items must ship in a #2 mailer. These items are all sold individually and when ordered in certain combos might not be a split shipment. We really need the split shipment to be either for certain items specifically within a bundle or based on automation rules we could build if “split” was an option there.

I see, well knowing the split function is active that makes me think it should be possible to build automations around them. 

I’ll switch the status to “In Consideration” and contact the product team 

Thanks, I appreciate you sending this back to the product team. A little more context on what would make this feature fully functional for us:

Adding split shipments as an action within automation rules (which it currently is not - just checked) would definitely help, especially because bundles can have complex shipping requirements and we need to control exactly when certain components should be separated.

We previously had a workaround using nested bundles. We could create one bundle containing components that should ship together, then include that bundle inside a larger bundle with components that ship separately. Since nested bundles are no longer supported, that workaround is gone. Bringing that functionality back would solve our immediate issue, although automation support would be a much cleaner solution.

The most complete solution would be to expand this into split shipment routing or shipping groups. The key distinction is that some SKUs need to be split from incompatible items, but not necessarily shipped alone.

For example, we have many different SKUs that all ship in the same long tube. If several of those different SKUs are on one order, they should be grouped into one tube shipment, while the other items on the order are split into a separate package. Currently, the bulk shipping option only seems to handle multiple quantities of the same SKU, rather than allowing different compatible SKUs to be grouped into the same split shipment.

That type of routing would make the split shipment feature much more useful for businesses where packaging requirements are based on groups of compatible products, rather than simply one SKU = one shipment.

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, I don't believe the new Auto-Split functionality addresses our use case.

We are a winery and need orders automatically cartonised based on the total quantity/weight of the shipment, regardless of which products are included.

Our products already have known weights in ShipStation:

• 750ml wine bottles: 1.33kg each (12 bottles per carton = ~16kg)
• 375ml wine bottles: 0.83kg each (12 bottles per carton = ~10kg)
• 1500ml wine bottles: 2.67kg each (6 bottles per carton = ~16kg)

The challenge is that customer orders often contain a mixture of products and quantities. For example, a customer may purchase 30 750ml bottles across multiple different wine SKUs. In that scenario, we need ShipStation to automatically determine the carton breakdown and create:

• Carton 1: 12 bottles (~16kg)
• Carton 2: 12 bottles (~16kg)
• Carton 3: 6 bottles (~8kg)

The important distinction is that we do not need the order split into multiple shipments based on products or SKU quantities.

What we need is multi-package shipping, where multiple package labels are generated under a single shipment/consignment.

Creating separate shipments creates separate consignments and tracking numbers, which:

• Provides a poorer customer experience because they receive multiple tracking numbers for a single order.
• Increases shipping costs, as a single consignment with multiple package labels is typically cheaper than multiple separate consignments.
• Adds additional operational overhead when managing and reconciling shipments.

Is there currently any functionality, or is any planned, that supports automatic cartonisation based on weight and quantity rules while maintaining a single shipment/consignment with multiple package labels? We currently do this manually with custom package sets, but its tedious and time consuming, and the package sets we may require are endless, we’ve set up the most popular but there’s not always the set we need for every order.