Weight & size
Two different weights matter when you sell something physical, and mixing them up is what makes shipping prices wrong:
- What the product weighs. A fact about the item, the same for everyone who sells it. It belongs to the product, and shoppers see it in Item Details on the store page.
- What your parcel weighs. The item plus your box, your padding and your packing slip. That is yours, it lives on your offer, and it is the only one a carrier ever prices.
This page is about the first one. The second is on the Shipping page, under Attach a profile to an offer.
Commerce → Products → your product → Weight & size.
The tab is for products. Services, plans and memberships have no weight, and the tab says so rather than showing you empty boxes.
What to enter
Section titled “What to enter”| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Weight | The item on its own, with no box |
| Length, Width, Height | The item’s own size — its three sides |
| Net contents | For anything sold by volume: a 1.5 L bottle is 1500 |
Weight and the three dimensions are shown in your own units — the ones you set under Account → Preferences → Units. If you work in pounds and inches, that is what the boxes ask for. Net contents is always in millilitres.
Two rules the form holds you to:
- All three sides or none. One side on its own tells a carrier nothing, so a part-measured product is refused rather than saved half-right.
- Nothing can be zero. A zero is not a measurement, it is a field someone tabbed through.
Everything here is optional. A product with no measurements works exactly as it does today — you just do the typing on each offer instead.
What it does for you
Section titled “What it does for you”Shoppers see it. Weight, Dimensions and Net contents appear in Item Details on the store page, in the units of the shopper’s own country — pounds and inches in the United States, kilograms and centimetres elsewhere. Search engines read the same facts from the page’s structured data.
It starts your shipping off right. When you set up delivery for an offer of this product, the Package boxes arrive already filled in from these measurements, with a line saying so:
Started from the product’s own measurements — add what your packaging weighs and measures before you save.
That is a starting point, not the answer. Your parcel is heavier and bigger than the thing inside it, so add the box before you save — carriers charge for the parcel, and on light bulky items they charge for the space it takes up as much as the weight.
Nothing is overwritten. If you have already typed a package weight, it is left alone; if you clear a box on purpose, it stays clear; and whatever is saved on the offer is what every shipping quote uses from then on. Changing the product’s measurements later does not change offers you have already saved.
Why it is not just copied to your shipping
Section titled “Why it is not just copied to your shipping”The measurements belong to the product, and a product is shared: several sellers can offer the same item. If shipping were priced straight from them, someone else editing the product’s spec would change what your buyers are charged. So the number your quotes use is always the one saved on your own offer, and this tab only ever offers it as a first draft.
See also
Section titled “See also”- Shipping — carrier accounts, profiles and the package facts on an offer
- Sell settings — the wizard where a product goes on sale