I had a customer this evening trying to checkout with a very large order -- she had a number of small items (beads, toy blocks, etc.) in her cart -- the number of items in the cart was well over 300 -- she kept getting timed out -- assumedly attempting to get valid shipping rates -- I'm not sure whether the issue is with the volume or the weight or both -- I was able to "edit" the order by pulling up the shopping cart that had not yet checked out and edited it, removing some items and was then able to get shipping rates.


So I guess I'm throwing out there -- are others seeing this? You would have to sell small items that customers purchase a large quantity of, and use actual carrier rates (I use FedEx and USPS). If it's an item-count issue, I could switch selling some items from individdually to bags of 5 or 10, but that would be a pain to switch everything too.

If you had one line item with a quantity of 300 and each item is set to "ship separately" or if each item is fairly heavy (meaning that it would only take a couple of them to reach UPS weight limits in a box) then it could be the shipping system.

The real time rates from carriers require our system to "box" items so to get estimates. We have to create boxes (called shipping groups in our code) that do not exceed the limits of each carrier. So in your case if every 5 items maxed out a box our software would need to ask the UPS system for the rates of 60 boxes which might timeout.

More info on this: I finally got the entire order to complete -- well, almost. Here are the steps:

1. I added the smaller volume items to the cart and retrieved shipping rates, saving the order after each one. When I got up to a total amount of 163 items, the next item to add was 50 1-inch beads, weighing 0.02 -- the system took 70 seconds to retrieve rates ,but it did get them. The last line item was 75 3/4-inch beads -- the system would not retrieve new rates, it timed out (as evidenced by the Event Log) after 2 minutes and simply returned the previous rates. Also Shipper shows the package weight to be only 35.04 pounds. So it can't be a weight issue -- it must be volume.