Concepts

A carton is packaging you keep on a shelf: a box, bag, mailer, tube or envelope. An item is a SKU you ship.

Both are catalogs keyed by SKU, both count against your plan separately, and a pack request names items — the solver chooses the cartons.

Interior dimensions decide what fits. Exterior dimensions decide what the carrier bills. Corrugated walls make them different by a quarter inch or more per axis.

Leave the exterior blank and it falls back to the interior, which understates dimensional weight.

Padding is void fill reserved on every interior face, so it comes off twice per axis: a 0.25 allowance in a 12 cavity leaves 11.5 packable.

It is per carton, defaulting to your organization’s setting. An allowance that leaves no space on any axis is rejected at save time.

A rectangular item has six axis-aligned poses. The lock says which are allowed — and identical poses of a square-section item are deduplicated before the search.

FLAT puts the shortest axis up, UPRIGHT the longest, and THIS_SIDE_UP keeps the cataloged height vertical.

stackable: false means nothing may rest on the item at all. maxStackWeight caps the mass its top face may carry; 0 means no explicit cap.

The check runs down the whole stack, not just the box directly beneath — a placement is rejected if any box below it would be overloaded.

A fragile item never receives load from above and is ordered last within its strategy, so it lands on the top layer.

Fragility is a property of the item, and a line may override the catalog with fragile: true for one order.

Bags, mailers and envelopes have no rigid cavity, so they are evaluated by volume rather than by 3D placement: contents must fit fillFactor of the cavity, and the stack may bulge by maxBulge.

The layout shown in the 3D view is a real arrangement, but it is a model of a bag — every flexible carton carries a warning saying so.

Dimensional weight prices the space a parcel occupies: outer volume divided by the carrier’s divisor. Carriers bill the greater of it and the gross weight.

Defaults are 139 in³ per lb and 5000 cm³ per kg. Override yours in settings, or per request with dimWeightDivisor.

Lines sharing a groupKey — a kit, a BOM set, a ships-together rule — are kept in one carton where the geometry allows.

It is a preference, not a constraint: an order that cannot fit stays packed rather than failing. Turn it off with keepGroupsTogether: false.

length runs along x, height along y, width along z. Gravity is −y.

A placement’s position is its minimum corner, measured from the bottom-front-left of the usable cavity, after padding.