7
Aug
2018
Shipping methods and prices
Just as with Payment Methods, we also need to think about the shipping methods we are going to offer to our customers. Where are we going to ship to?
Table of Contents
Shipping Method
Do we charge our customers for it and if yes, does the amount depend on the shipping address, the weight of the products or both? Also here we have to think about several aspects:
- Which carrier(s) are we going to use?
- Is there any integration needed of our orders with that carrier or will we work manually?
- What are our shipping prices and in which way are we going to calculate shipping to our customers?
Looking at the functions WooCommerce is offering we see a similar screen as used for Payment Methods. There are a couple of settings that we need to check:
At the top of the screen, we’ll find all settings regarding shipping, which we already discussed during Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce.
Shipping Process
Below the settings, we’ll find all standard available shipping methods. Every Shipping Method has a link on top of the screen that will bring us to the settings page for that Shipping Method. This is what WooCommerce has to offer by default:
- Flat Rate, a fixed amount of shipping costs for all orders.
- Free Shipping, speaks for itself.
- International Delivery, for customers outside of our own country. Similar to Flat Rate shipping. The amount does not differ per country.
- Local Delivery, for customers living near us. We could enter zip codes to specify when this method will be available.
Shipping Priority
You may sort the table by dragging the various shipping methods around. This is useful because the sorting here will also be the sort order of shipping methods the user sees during checkout. Besides that, using the priority field you can control the order in which the shipping methods are selected. If two or more Shipping Methods have the same priority, the one with the lowest cost will be selected first.
- Local Pickup. Instead of delivering the order, our customers could also pick it up of course. WooCommerce assumes that in this case there’s no charge for our customer.
Flat Rate method
Let’s take a closer look at the Flat Rate method, just to check how we need to configure it. Just click on the Flat Rate link at the top of your screen. The Flat Rate method will calculate one shipping rate per order, regardless of the weight and dimensions of the products in that order.
The Flat Rate cannot differ per country, but the field Costs can contain a calculation, which means that the Flat Rate can also be a percentage of the total order value:
Some examples of a calculated Cost field could be:
5 + ( 1 * [qty] ) Which would calculate $5 for every order plus $1 extra for every item in that order
10 + [fee percent=”10″ min_fee=”2″] Would calculate a base amount of $10 plus 10% of the order total with a minimum of $2
Looking at the available Shipping Methods, we can imagine running short on possibilities. What if we need a Shipping Method that calculates the shipping rate based on the country, delivery address and the products that we’ll ship?
Table Rate shipping
That’s no longer a Flat Rate anymore and the other shipping methods do not offer a solution. In such a situation, WooCommerce needs additional extensions. A good and very flexible, but pretty expensive extension would be the Table Rate shipping plugin.
Building E-Commerce Solutions with WooCommerce
This book has been written for everyone who wants to learn how to expand an existing WordPress website with e-commerce functions using the WooCommerce plugin.
