Shipping by zone enables you to specify different shipping methods (eg. Royal Mail First Class) and shipping classes (eg. Small letter, medium package, large package etc).
A basic example:
You sell various birthday cards individually and also in a bulk pack. The cost of sending a single card is going to cost less than a 24 pack of cards. You can set the shipping class of a single card to “Small letter” and the pack of cards to “Medium package”. This will ensure the customer pays the appropriate shipping cost.
Setting up shipping
- Head over to Store Manager > Settings > Shipping tab and enable shipping
- Select from the drop down Flat Rate. This will create your shipping zone for your store.
- You now need to add methods to your shipping zone. Click Add Shipping Methods
- This will take you to the shipping method page. By default you won’t have any set. Click + Add Shipping Method
- A shipping method dialog box will pop up. For now we want to create a various flat rates so select Flat Rate from the drop down and then Add Shipping Method
- You’ll now be back on the page from Step 4 only now you’ll see a method “Flat Rate”. Click Edit under this method
- You’ll now see this shipping methods title along with its various preset classes available that can be assigned to products.
Lets look at a break down of the image above.
- Method Title – If you are just wanting to charge a single set fee across your whole store you could just leave the title as Flat Rate. If you’d like to offer First and Second Class postage you may wish to change this to ‘First Class Royal Mail’ then create another method for Second Class Roya Mail.
- Cost – This is the base cost of the shipping method. By entering a price here (and only here) all your pricing will be the same regardless of the class assigned. If you enter a price here and under a class such as “Large letter”, the two values will be added together.
- Cost of Shipping Class ‘Free Postage’ – If you wanted to offer free shipping on some items, but not all you can use this box. Within the product listing settings in the shipping tab you’d then select free shipping instead of one of the other parcel sizes. You could also use a formula to charge a small fee on each subsequent items that are ordered.
- The shipping classes – You only need to fill in the the ones you intend to use. Eg. You might only send items as Large Letter and Small Parcel. In these boxes you can either have just a flat rate, or you could use formulas to create more complex shipping calculation.
Shipping Formula example
4.50 + ([qty]*0.5) – This shipping formula will charge £4.50 plus an additional 50p for every item added.
If I purchase 1 item, the cost would be £5.00 (£4.50 + 1 x 0.5)
If I purchase 2 items, the cost will be £5.50 (£4.50 + 2 x 0.5)
If I purchase 5 items, the cost will be £7.00 (£4.50 + 5 x 0.5)
Calculation type
Lastly you may wish to charge shipping on a per class or per order basis. You may choose this by using the calculation type drop down at the bottom of the dialog screen.
Per class: Add up the different shipping classes together to calculate the final shipping cost.
Per order: Only charge for the most expensive shipping class (ie. you could charge for a large package and bundle a small item inside)
When creating product listings always double check your postage is set up correctly by adding your item into your basket. Then you’ll be able to see from your basket if shipping has been applied correctly.
To refresh your changes, simply add/remove a quantity from your basket.