Size and weight on an item, and what packing does with them
Two fields, two jobs. An item’s weight decides how the cold bags split. Its size — length, width, height — decides how many boxes an order needs. Fill in both and Packing Day does the rest.
Measure the package, not the food. A pound of butter is not a pound-of-butter-shaped thing; it is a tub. Measure what you actually put in the box, lid included.
Round things do not stack like square ones. A jar leaves gaps a block of cheese does not, and the box calculator knows this — but it has to be told which an item is. It is worth being honest here. Guessing that a jar packs like a brick is how an order gets one box when it needed two.
Items sold as a set. If you sell a four dozen bundle of eggs, what is being handled is four cartons, not one bundle. An item that is really several pieces should say so, or a box will be chosen for a package that is a quarter of the real size.
Things that go in no box at all. A gift card, a delivery charge, a farm day ticket — these are on the order but nobody packs them. They are skipped, so they do not add an imaginary box to somebody’s order.
What happens if you leave it empty. Nothing breaks. An item with no size is simply not counted towards the boxes, which means an order full of unmeasured items will under-count — and under-counting is the one that hurts, because the packer runs out of room. If your box counts look low, empty size fields are the first place to look.
A name that disagrees with a field. If an item is called 3 Pounds Sweet Potatoes and its weight says one and a half pounds, believe neither until you have weighed one. The bags split on the number in the field, not the number in the name, so a wrong field means a bag that tears.