Amazon Marketplace – Shipping charges based on weight (2014)

It is public knowledge that the weights indicated on products on Amazon are very often wrong.

The explanation is simple: Product pages are shared by all merchants, information sources are varied and specific to each merchant who indicates the weight with its tare weight etc., so that when one relies on the data provided by Amazon to calculate the shipping costs by weight of an article, the calculation is wrong.

The Amazon Marketplace for Prestashop now offers to set the shipping costs based on weight!

You can create a carrier on your Prestashop back-office and associate it with the offers that you are exporting to the marketplace. The module will calculate the amount of the shipping costs based on the weight of the article and then associate it with that article. In this way, you simulate shipping cost management by weight on Amazon based on the real weight stated in your Prestashop store.

Several configurations are possible:

– Additive shipping costs:

The shipping costs will be added to the existing shipping costs and set on Amazon.

– Exclusive shipping costs:

The shipping costs will replace the shipping costs that are set by default on your Amazon back-office.

Sample configuration by article based on weight

To simulate the shipping costs by weight, you use both the Amazon configuration and the Prestashop configuration. For example:

You select the “Smart Shipping” configuration in the module configuration:

You choose “Additive” to add the Prestashop shipping costs to the Amazon shipping costs.
You set on Amazon an initial amount of shipping costs per delivery:

On Prestashop, for your carrier you set the delta between the shipping costs per consignment and the final price you want to charge:

So in this example, the shipping costs of the first article weighing from 0 to 200g are billed at 3.00 + 2.25.

A weight range from 200g to 400g is added:

So the second article in the order will be billed at 3.70, an order with two items, an article weighing less than 200g and a second weighing more than 200g will be billed at 3.00 +2.25 + 3.70, which is 8.95. So we have simulated shipping costs that are closest to our shipping costs by weight table for our carrier.

The “Smart Shipping” functionality is available from version 4 of the Amazon Marketplace for Prestashop module.