Setting up shipping in WooCommerce – from A to Z
WooCommerce is quite powerful e-commerce system. Thousands of businesses, large and small, use this platform for selling physical and digital products around the world. But in order to sell physical products any WooCommerce online store needs to have shipping rules and shipping prices.
Here you’ll find tutorial how to set up shipping in WooCommerce. From basic flat rate to free shipping, weight based shipping and other, more advanced shipping methods. Let’s begin with few basic examples:
First step before setting up shipping methods in WooCommerce – setting up shipping zones
Before setting up shipping methods in WooCommerce you need to set up shipping zones. For example, if you live in North America you may have one set of shipping rules for shipping to USA shipping zone, and another set of shipping rules and pricing for Canada shipping zone. Shipping zones can be limited not only by country. They can be limited to specific cities, postcodes and so on.
Let’s begin with setting up couple of shipping zones in WooCommerce. Go to WooCommerce >> Settings in WordPress admin panel, and select Shipping tab. Once you’re there, click Add shipping zone button.
Enter shipping zone name. It will be visible only for store administrators, and will help you recognize it in the settings. It may be country name, region name, or any other name you may think is best at the moment. You could always change it later if needed.
Then select Zone regions. In the example I use only one region – Canada. But you may select more than one region. For example, you may select only few Canada regions, add some regions from USA if they’re nearby and so on.
Currently we’re only setting up a few regions, so you can leave Shipping methods empty – we’ll deal with them later in the article. Hit Save Changes.
After creating one region you may add more of them in the Shipping >> Shipping zones page.
Now when we have one or more shipping zones defined we can start adding shipping methods and prices in WooCommerce. Let’s start with fixed priced shipping (flat rate shipping).
How to set up flat rate shipping in WooCommerce
Flat rate shipping means fixed price for any order in specific shipping zone. For example if you want to set $5.00 price for any order shipping in Canada, you need to add Flat rate shipping method in Canada shipping zone. Here’s how you do it.
Go to WooCommerce >> Settings, and select Shipping tab. Then open shipping zone you want to add flat rate to (like Canada in the example), and click Add shipping method button there.
Select Flat rate in the select box – this method is available in WooCommerce by default. Then click Add shipping method.
Now you’ll see the method added to your selected shipping zone. Click on it’s title (Flat rate) to set it up.
You may rename method title if needed.
If you want to add taxes to shipping cost then set Tax status to Taxable. If you don’t want to calculate taxes for shipping price, change taxable to None.
Then add fixed shipping cost and hit Save changes button.
That’s it – fixed shipping cost is set in your WooCommerce online store.
How to set up free shipping in WooCommerce
Free shipping in WooCommerce is used when you want to encourage customers to spend more money on orders. Then you can reward them with free shipping. For example every customer who spends $30 or more on the order will get free shipping as a reward. He’re how to set up free shipping over specific amount in WooCommerce.
Go to WooCommerce >> Settings, and select Shipping tab. Open shipping zone you want to add free shipping to, and click Add shipping method button there. Select Free shipping this time, and click Add shipping method button.
Once Free shipping method is added, click on it to edit it’s settings.
Now set up rules for free shipping. You may select:
a valid free shipping coupon. So you would create shipping coupon which allows free shipping.
a minimum order amount. When customer spends X amount on order, shipping is free
combinations of order amount and shipping.
We’ll select a minimum order amount in this example.
Now enter a minimum order amount. Free shipping will be activated only when the order amount is equal or larger than the amount entered.
Once you hit Save changes button, free shipping over specified amount in WooCommerce will be activated.
Other shipping methods in WooCommerce
Next time I’ll show you other shipping methods, like Weight based shipping. Stay tuned!
