Shipping & freight

The Shipping screen — quotes and bookings

What it is

Freight is handled by the shipping calculator (shipping.hbplastics.com.au). It gets live quotes from multiple carriers (via Shippit, plus a direct Team Global Express option), works out how the order packs into parcels, flags pallets / oversize items, and can book the consignment.

flowchart LR
  A[Enter suburb + items] --> B[Pack into parcels]
  B --> C[Quote every carrier → cheapest marked]
  C --> D[Choose a rate]
  D --> E[Book consignment → tracking number]

How to quote and book freight

Enter the destination — start typing the suburb/postcode (autocomplete).
Confirm the items/dimensions. If the auto-read is off, enter the items by hand (description, material, dimensions, weight, quantity) for an exact quote.
Get the quote — you’ll get a list of carrier rates with the cheapest marked.
Choose a rate (usually the cheapest; you can pick another).
Book the consignment — this creates the order with the carrier and returns a tracking number.

Staff see this on the cart/checkout (customer-facing), in the PIM (with the pallet/oversize flags and cost/sell/margin), and freight fields show on the Pipedrive deal.

The flags that matter

⚠️ Pallet & oversize flags — read them before quoting freight

The system flags a package as:

Pallet — heavy or big (over ~30kg, or very long/wide/bulky). Parcel couriers are dropped and the price is clamped to a sensible band, because carriers otherwise return nonsense (one real 215kg pallet came back anywhere from $24 to $3,512 — the true rate was ~$170).
Oversize — a long but light item (like a 1.8–2.4m acrylic tube under 30kg) that would sneak a cheap parcel rate a courier then surcharges or refuses. The long-item trigger is 1800mm.

On an oversize flag in the PIM, decide whether to add a manual surcharge — the customer-facing rate stays as-is until you do.

What happens when you click Book

When you click Book on the PIM Shipping tab, two things happen in sequence:

Order created in Shippit — the consignment is registered with dimensions, weight, and recipient address.
Book step — Shippit allocates a courier, generates a label, and moves the order to “Ready to Ship”.

Shippit’s courier allocation is async — step 2 sometimes isn’t ready immediately. When that happens:

You’ll see a “booking in progress…” badge on the shipment detail.
The system automatically retries every 3 minutes (up to 50 orders per cycle). Most bookings complete within one or two cycles.
If it’s still stuck, the detail shows “attempt N” with a tooltip showing the last error — this helps Daniel diagnose carrier-side issues.
You don’t need to click Book again — it will complete on its own. But you can if you want to retry immediately.

Once booked, the system auto-manifests (dispatches the pickup) for Perspex and P&M accounts. Other accounts need a manual End of Day.

Cancelling a booked shipment

Cancelling a booked shipment doesn’t delete it — it un-books the order (voids it in Shippit) and returns it to the Intake tab as “pending quote” so you can re-book it with a different carrier or address.

Cancelling an unbooked intake row (never sent to Shippit) removes it from the queue permanently.

If the shipping calculator is down

💡 Orders never get blocked on freight

If the quote service is unavailable, the order still goes through and an operator hand-quotes the freight afterwards. Don’t hold up a sale waiting on shipping.

Gotchas

Carrier prices are GST-inclusive — don’t mix ex-GST and inc-GST when comparing or margining.
Long light items are the classic trap — trust the oversize flag over a suspiciously cheap parcel rate.

Common questions

The quote looks way too cheap for a big/long item. Check the pallet/ oversize flag — the parcel rate is probably wrong; use the floored/clamped price or hand-quote.
No quote came back. The service may be down — proceed and hand-quote (see above).
I booked but it says “booking in progress”. Normal — Shippit is still allocating a courier. It will complete within a few minutes automatically.
The label button says “Not Found”. The label only exists after the book step completes. If it shows “booking in progress”, wait for that to finish.
I cancelled a booked order but it didn’t come back to Intake. It should now — this was fixed (July 2026). If it still doesn’t appear, refresh the page.

Who to tell if it breaks

Tell Daniel or flag in #whats-new.

Derived from: the shipping-calculator worker, NOTES, product-master-worker shipping-ops, and PIM dashboard Shipping page. If this looks wrong, the source changed — update the source and re-generate, don’t just patch this page.