I'm trying to get my head around how Shipstation (mis)handles product weights, and my head is spinning.
Shipstation does import product weights from Woocommerce, and offers an overall parcel weight based on those imported weights. It's a useful sanity check, and an alert operator can use it to spot wrong weights in Woocommerce. But we weigh each parcel before shipping as packaging varies and it's useful as part of the audit trail of what went into a parcel.
I started manually inputting Shipstation weights in the Shipping Defaults section stating "The following options will only apply to shipments containing quantity 1 of this product." They are potentially useful for single item orders where the packaging is very predictable. But I find these weights in fact override the imported weights on multiple item orders, which is not what it says it's going to do.
As an aside, the CSV input of these weights is quite messed up if you use metric weights, as you have to convert to imperial before importing. And then they are (inaccurately) converted back to metric once imported. And the CSV export of them with metric conversions cannot be reimported.
This is all a bit annoying, but not difficult to work around. However, when you look at international shipping it's a real eye-opener. It looks to me that both the Woocommerce weights and any Shipstation product weights are ignored. And the customs declaration divides the total shipment weight by the number of products, and declares the weight of each product equally, even when they are completely different. And there is no option to manually input the item weight in the customs declaration. It's also quite annoying that all the customs data has to be uploaded as a specially formatted CSV, instead of pulling the fields from Woocommerce, like Shipstation's main competitor in the UK.
We haven't had any parcels returned yet since we've been using Shipstation (in the last week), but it looks as if Shipstation is not fit for purpose when dealing with international shipments, and I am considering swtiching to another service at least for international, and possibly for everything, to keep it all under one roof.
If there something I have missed? Is anyone shipping to Europe encountering similar issues, and has anyone found workarounds?
