Shipping cost classes

[minh]

If one sells products that vary a lot in size and weight it is not always good to charge the real cost for shipping. It will not encourge customers to buy more each time. Cumulative discounts or a one-price shipping charge are ways around this.

Another way would be to have shipping charge classes/freight classes. Let's say one would tag each product with Freight Class 1, Freight Class 2, etc. Each freight class would be asigned an individual charge but these should "overlap" so that freight class 2 would perhaps cost 25% more than freight class 1.

Then it should be possible to organize how freight classes adds up, i.e. buying two products with freigh class 1 could cost as freight class 1, but 3 products with freight class 1 would make it freight class 2 (but freight class 2 would of course cost less than a double freight class 1). One product of freight class 1, one of freight class 2 and one of freight class 3 would perhaps add up to a cart of freight class 3. In this way it would be possible to avoid making snowballing shipping costs something that discourage customers from buying more products while they're at it.

Something similar to this can already be done with a creative use of the weight pricing, but it will not be displayed in the cart as such.

I think this would be good to have this as an alternative. Each product would have a specification of its shipping cost class in the product page, and the shipping class of the whole cart would be shown in the cart.

Any thoughts on this?