Shipping Separately and Qty

I'm running into the similar scenario here:
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/37932/ship-separately-issues.aspx

Basically, shipping separately seems to mean ship apart from other items.
What about the scenario where we need to ship each of the same item separately?
Quantity 4 of the same item = 4 separate boxes. What am I overlooking here?

par6 wrote:

It really seems more like a "packaging" issue than a "shipping" issue to me.

When calculating your shipping rates, you want the customer to see the total cost for shipping their order displayed, but you need for the system to calculate that cost based on the fact that you will "package" each of a particular item in its own individual container/box...right?

For complex shipping/packaging scenarios, there really is no better choice than the Shipping Director plugin.
I'm sure New York (it's developer) will chime in here, but I feel pretty certain you'd be able to work out a solution for your problem with it.

"ship separately" means that nopCommerce will make multiple/separate calls to your shipping providers, and then aggregate the like-named methods rates.  E.g.  If you use UPS and offer Ground and Next Day, then nopCommerce calls USP API multiple times, and then sums together the separate Ground rates into a single Ground amount, and similar for Next Day, so that the customer see just one Ground and one Next Day.  The carriers, like UPS, typically have a base rate, and then the rate depends on weight (and dimensions), so multiple rate calls will typically be more $ than if just one call for the same total weight.  If you are using an 'internal' provider, like Shipping By Weight, then you would get a similar result.   The bottom-line is that you should test a few different cart contents to see if the rates are what you'd expect.

Example where ship separately is good, but also Shipping Director is needed.

You might have a situation where one of your products is a "case of 4" 1-gallon jugs of liquid.

You might also have a product that is 1 x 5-gallon jug of that same liquid.

If you sell 1-4 gallons of the liquid, it will come in 1-gallon jugs inside a box..you can offer many shipping options to customers.

If you sell a 5-gallon jug, you can offer fewer options(no expedited at all)...but get a better overall per-pound rate.

So if a customer wants to buy 6,7,8 gallons of the liquid, you now have a complex scenario because you want to offer the lowest possible shipping rate, but you also want to offer more than the slower methods available for shipping 5-gallon containers....

You can ship 5,6,7,8 x 1-gallon jugs in two SEPARATE boxes many different ways, including Fedex...which may make the customer happier...or offer only ground/truck shipping to send 1 case of 3 and 1 x 5-gallon...

I hope this makes sense.