Fish and Ships has just added support for Studio Wombat’s Advanced Product Fields plugin. Thanks to this new feature, you’ll be able to condition shipping rates for products with unique and variable characteristics that influence weight, area, or size through configuration fields. These products could be rugs, tiles, flooring, or any product with configurable dimensions.
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Key Benefits about Shipping rates through Advanced Product Fields
- Adaptability: With Advanced Product Fields, online store owners can add additional fields to WooCommerce product pages. These fields can address details such as area, size, or other relevant specifications for shipping rates calculation.
- Seamless Integration: Thanks to the compatibility between Fish and Ships and Advanced Product Fields, shipping rates can be automatically and accurately calculated based on the data entered in the additional product fields: You’ll never have to manually provide shipping cost estimates again.
- Efficiency: Eliminate the need for complicated manual calculations, constant adjustments, or a huge array of variations. With this integration, shipping rates adjust dynamically and precisely based on the specifications of each product configuration.
- Transparency: Provide your customers with a transparent purchasing experience by showing exact shipping rates based on the specific characteristics of the products they are purchasing.
- Competitiveness: With precise and efficient shipping rates management, you can remain competitive in an ever-evolving market and meet your customers’ expectations.
Advanced Product Fields: The numeric fields
Numeric fields allow you to sell a product by meters, by kilograms, by square meters (area), etc. Without this integration between the two plugins, you wouldn’t be able to determine the weight/size of a user-choice product; you would have to limit yourself to establishing conditions based on the product data from the “shipping” tab in WooCommerce’s administration, or at most, rely on WooCommerce variations, which are obviously limited if you want to sell fabrics per meter.
With the new compatibility between Fish and Ships and Studio Wombat’s Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce, you can configure rules based on the values of the fields and apply costs based on this characteristic.
Repeatable Advanced Product Fields of type number
With the paid (pro) versions of Advanced Product Fields, you can make the number fields of products duplicable by the buyer. Fish and Ships also supports this feature: it will automatically detect it and offer you whether you want to add up the values of the different duplicate fields (for example, if they are linear meters, weight, etc.) or multiply them.
Advanced Product Fields: The calculated fields
A second type of field offered by Advanced Product Fields is calculated fields. These fields do not have direct input from the user and obtain their value from a formula that can be simple or really complex: the possibilities are almost endless. With Fish and Ships, you can also establish conditions based on the value of these fields.
Detection of Product Fields: the global fields
Fish and Ships supports global fields only from Advanced Product Fields, both numeric and calculated. It does not support individual product fields. For example, if you want to set a length rule for a specific product, you’ll have to define this field globally and put a rule that restricts this field/fields to a specific product, category, etc. And if later on, you create more products with these fields (for example, length, weight, area, etc.), you won’t have to redefine the shipping rules again.
Advanced Product Fields: free & paid versions
Even though we give support for the APF features seen in this post in our two versions of Fish and Ships (free and pro), you must take in consideration that some of the field types and options discussed in this post are only available in APF paid versions: In the APF free version you’ll find the number type input field, without the repeatable feature. The calculation field is fully paid feature, and the category assignation too.
