To set up shipping in WooCommerce, you first set up shipping zones, then add methods to those zones, and lastly, rates to your plans. You can create as many zones as you like and add multiple ways and rates to each zone. In this article, we’ll show you a tutorial and guide on how to setup the shipping options for products in the WooCommerce shop in WordPress.
WooCommerce has three main types of shipping options, and extensions help with further customizations. Let’s go over the three core shipping options. Free Shipping: If you choose free shipping, you can offer free shipping on any order or set the “Free shipping requires” field. Flat Rate Shipping: Create a standard rate per item, order, or shipping class.
How Shipping WooCommerce Products
As shown in this guide and tutorial, shipping products from our WooCommerce shop on WordPress is an essential option for our customers. We have already configured many things, but there are more steps ahead. At the moment, we will be focusing on the settings in the WooCommerce Shipping tab, where you can go by choosing:
When you install and activate the WooCommerce plugin, you’ll fill out a few information pages to setup your account. One of those pages is Shipping. You can tweak and add extensions later, but you’ll set basic shipping zones, product weight, and dimension parameters for now.
Basic Shipping Zones Setup
Two zones are automatically in the United States and everywhere else. Under the United States and “Locations not covered by your other zones” sections, you can select flat rates, fill in the amounts, or select free shipping.
On the other hand, you can turn off the “Set a fixed price to cover shipping costs” button. If you’d prefer to offer live rates from a specific carrier, there are extensions you can add, which we’ll cover in another section below.
WooCommerce Shipping Setup Weight and Dimensions
This page is also where you’ll set how you measure products. You can choose kilograms, grams, pounds, or ounces for product weight. Similarly, you can select meters, centimeters, millimeters, inches, or yards for product dimensions.
Advanced WooCommerce Shipping Setup Tutorial
Once you finish the initial WooCommerce setup, you can go into your settings (in the left sidebar under “WooCommerce”) to set shipping zones, classes, and other options. Here’s the difference in how to ship WooCommerce products between a shipping zone and a shipping class:
Shipping Zone: Geographic region with specific shipping options. WooCommerce will show shipping methods to a customer based on their shipping address. Shipping Class: Shipping based on product type; applied to products grouped by similarity.
Shipping Zones
To start, WooCommerce shipping only gives you two zones: US and non-US. However, this section allows you to create additional zones within the US and abroad. For example, you could do something like this: Firstly, you live in New York, so that you can offer free shipping in New York State. Similarly, you allow people to pick up products from a specific New York location.
For the rest of the country, you charge a flat rate of $10 for shipping. To send a package to Australia, the flat rate shipping cost is $25. Finally, the flat rate shipping cost is $15 everywhere else not specified in shipping zones. (This is set under “Locations not covered by your other zones.”).
Flat Rates
Shipping zones can have flat rates, and you can create multiple flat rates per zone. To set the flat-rate amount, click “Flat rate” in the “Shipping methods” box under your shipping zone, then fill in the blank sections. The “Method title” is what people will see when they check out. Tax status can be set to Taxable or None—cost” of shipping for the whole cart. However, leaving this field blank will disable flat-rate pricing.
Charging Additional Fees
In the “Cost” field, you can enter placeholders to charge per item instead of applying the flat rate to the entire purchase. The placeholder [qty] charges an additional fee for each product in the cart. Fill out the “Cost” field with something like this: 10 + (5 * [qty]). That means you’ll charge your flat rate of $10 plus $5 for each item in the cart.
The placeholder [fee] charges an extra shipping fee based on a percentage of the total. Set a percent, then a min_fee or max_fee, which means the price can’t go below or above a certain amount. For example, Your flat rate shipping is $10. In the “Cost” field, you write 10 + [fee percent=”5″ max_fee=”10″]. Shipping will cost your base fee of $10 + 5% of the total cost of purchase without exceeding $10
WooCommerce Shipping Setup Classes
Creating WooCommerce shipping classes is helpful if your shop has items at different weights and your customers usually buy one product at a time. You can also use Shipping Classes to offer different types of shipping on certain products. For instance, you can create Free Shipping, Regular Shipping, and Rush Shipping classes. Here’s how you’d fill in each cost: Free Shipping: 0 * [qty]. Regular Shipping: 5 * [qty] to charge the regular rate of $5 per item. Rush Shipping: 10 * [qty] to charge the expedited rate of $10 per item.
You must return to your shipping zones to set flat rate costs per shipping class. Click “Flat rate,” then set each class’ shipping cost. (To make this whole process flow better, setup your shipping classes before setting up shipping zones.) There are two “Calculation type” options:
Per Class: The shipping class determines the shipping cost. Per Order: The most expensive item in the order specifies the cost. You’ll want to fill in the “No shipping class cost” field using the per-class calculation type.
Shipping Extensions For WooCommerce
When you select WooCommerce from the left sidebar in WordPress, you can click on Extensions at the bottom of the list. There’s a section for shipping extensions, and this is where you’ll want to go if you’d prefer to calculate real-time shipping costs based on carrier and location.
WooCommerce extensions connect you with carriers like the Australian Post, FedEx, and the Royal Mail. Furthermore, you can use extensions to integrate with inventory management and fulfillment services or to offer special shipping, like buy one get one or gifts. Here are some of the most useful shipping extensions:
- Per Product Shipping: Create different, product-specific shipping costs; they’ll combine at checkout for a total shipping cost.
- WooCommerce Distance Rate Shipping: Calculate shipping rates based on distance or travel time.
- Order Delivery: Let customers choose a delivery date and time during checkout.
- Local Pickup Plus: Choose a pickup date and let customers pick up their orders from a predetermined location.
- WooCommerce Advanced Shipping Packages: Split a cart into different packages, each with its shipping configuration.
- Shipping Multiple Addresses: Ship different items in one order to multiple addresses.
- Postcode/Address Validation: Let customers look up or validate their addresses during checkout.
- WooCommerce Print Invoices and Packing Lists: Generate invoices, packing lists, and packing slips for orders.
- WooCommerce Shipping: Print labels from the WooCommerce dashboard at the lowest USPS rate possible. (There’s also a Stamps.com extension, which lets you print USPS shipping labels.)
- Shipment Tracking: Add shipment tracking info to orders.
Concluding
We hope this tutorial and guide on how to setup product shipping options in the WooCommerce shop on WordPress have helped you.
