Understanding the FedEx Box Packing Priority and Custom Boxes

The WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin offers you to set up the FedEx box packing priority and create custom boxes for your order. In this article, we will tell you how both the features work and how Shopify users can use Shopify FedEx App to create custom boxes for their FedEx shipments.

What are FedEx Boxes?

FedEx offers quite a lot of boxes to ship different kinds of orders. Our WooCommerce FedEx shipping plugin offers some of those boxes and allows store owners to create own custom boxes as well.

But before using this plugin to deal with your FedEx orders, you need to understand how the FedEx boxes are packed and how you can customize your own boxes.

Let us see an example from one of our customer who explains his business case.

Lorenzo: We are going to use our own custom boxes. Is there a way to prioritize one speciality box over the other in the packaging generation? For example, we have one box that will fix most of the items, and we have another box that is bigger that we will use when the customer orders many items together and it cannot fit in the small box.

Here, he wants to use our plugin in order to pack his items optimally and our plugin does exactly that. You see, our box packing algorithm prioritizes boxes by itself.

Meaning, if the item does not fit into a particular FedEx box then it automatically goes for the next FedEx box that has a bigger dimension. So, if an item does not fit the FedEx Medium box, the plugin automatically shifts to the FedEx Large box and generates rates for the same.

Using WooCommerce FedEx shipping plugin to use FedEx Boxes

Now, if you have some items that will fit into the default FedEx boxes, then you can opt for custom boxes. In the FedEx settings under the WooCommerce shipping section, if you have selected the packing option as Recommended: Pack into boxes with weight and dimensions, then you would be able to see various boxes.

You can find the option to do that in the FedEx settings under the WooCommerce Shipping settings. You can refer the following image as shown below.

In the image above you can see that we have created some custom boxes – Large framed art box, laptop box, small electronics box, and tablet box. Thus, if a customer orders one of these items from our store, FedEx can pack the items based on these dimensions. You can even choose only the type of FedEx packages that you want to offer to your customers.

In the image given above, the red arrow on the right side points to the checkboxes that will allow you to choose the required FedEx box. However, the shipping rate would be calculated based on the weight, physical dimension, shipping distance, taxes, and many other factors as well.

Defining a custom box in Shopify

With this App, you can display real-time FedEx shipping rates on your Shopify Checkout page. You can even print shipping labels from your store and provide live tracking to your customers. You can read more about Shopify FedEx App here.

Coming to the point, the App comes with the Weight-based packing method. So you can pack boxes based on their weight. The App has two options—Max Weight (used to set maximum weight limit) and Weight Unit (set the weight unit). Here’s how the packaging method option looks like.

You can define custom boxes under the Shipping option of your Settings page. Shopify allows you to have multiple custom boxes and define their weight and dimensions as well. Refer to the image below.

Conclusion

This article covers FedEx Boxes and custom boxes. It also covers how you can make the best use of the custom boxes for your WooCommerce or Shopify store using the WooCommerce FedEx Shiping plugin or Shopify FedEx App respectively.

The App, in particular, is one of the best tools to accomplish all your Shopify shipping needs. It covers all the FedEx shipping services availability, live shipping rate calculation, label generation, live shipment tracking, and much more.

If you have any query regarding this article, feel free to share your views in the comment section below. You can contact our customer support if you have any issue setting up FedEx shipping on your online store.

Happy selling!