Our shipping feature has built in options to get rates directly from the USPS or UPS servers. The way these options work is by sending order data (your location, the buyer's location, the weight of the shipment and the number of packages) to the server for USPS or UPS, their servers then send us a shipping rate based on that data.
If you want to customize your shipping option, to get the rates as you mentioned in your first post, you would need to do so by setting up custom shipping rules. Based on how you described the way you want to charge for shipping that would mean setting up multiple Flat shipping rules for each state, so California would have one shipping rate for one product and a different one for six, and you would have to repeat that setup with different shipping amounts for each state, which is why I said it would be possible to setup, but it will be complex as well as requiring a lot of time to enter in the different rates for each location.
