The Three Stages of WooCommerce Shipping
If there's one aspect of WooCommerce that leaves people a little cold and confused, it's how to set up shipping. In this video, I'm going to say the three key stages are exactly how to set up your shipping. So by the end of this video, you're going to have your shipping in place and a good understanding of how those three key principles all work.
Firstly, before we start, let's break this down. What are the three key stages of setting up your shipping with WooCommerce? The first thing is shipping zones and methods. And what exactly is a shipping zone? Well, a shipping zone is basically where you want to ship your product to. For example, it could be a country, it could be a state, it could be right the way down to a postcode. So we have to make sure that we set all those up that are relevant to the shipping methods.
The next thing is the shipping rates. So we have three basic kinds of shipping rates we can use with WooCommerce straight out of the box. We've got a flat fee per order, we got a flat rate per item, and we got a percentage-based shipping. We'll cover all three of those methods and take a look at some more advanced ways of working with those as we go through and jump to section two.
And finally, we have stage three, which is shipping classes. The shipping classes allow us to create product-specific charges, so we can apply those to a product-by-product basis. And again, we'll take a look at that in the third stage of this video. So now we've taken a look at what those three methods are, let's take a look at setting up the first part, which is the shipping zones and methods.
Accessing Shipping Settings & Limiting Locations
If you just install WooCommerce and you log in to your dashboard, you should see an Add shipping method zones pop up like you can see at the top of the screen. So you could access the shipping zones directly from here. But if you don't have this message, it's easy to still access that information. All we need to do is come up to WooCommerce on the left-hand side, come down to the settings section. Once we're in there, you can see we have an option for shipping, so we can click and open up the shipping options.
Once we're in there, you can see we can add shipping zones directly into this area. So from here, we could easily go in and start creating our shipping zones. There's one other thing I want to draw your attention to before we start setting that up. Now, say for example you're in a particular country, you're selling a physical product and you only want to deal with that particular country or a range of countries. We can do that, and to access that we simply come to the General section under the settings of WooCommerce. And you can see if we scroll down, we've got general options at which point we've got selling locations and shipping locations. So by using these options, we can limit exactly where we can sell and/or where we ship to.
Configuring Global Selling and Shipping Locations
So, let's put that into place. Let's just say for example I want to sell to specific countries. You can see I've got sell to all countries, sell to all countries except for, which means they can fine tune in a quicker and easier fashion, or sell to specific countries. For this example, let's say sell to specific countries. I'm going to come in there and we're going to start typing in, and you can see this will go through and start filtering out exactly where I want to actually allow selling. So let's say sell to specific countries, we're going to use that. We'll say the UK and will also say Ireland. So I've now set that up so I only actually sell to two specific countries.
We can now do the same thing with the shipping. So we can come in and say ship to specific countries only, ship to all countries you sell to, to all countries, or disable shipping and shipping calculations. We're going to say ship to all countries you sell to. This is a quick and easy way of saying I only want to be able to ship to Ireland and UK or in your case, whatever countries you may set up. Indeed, once you've done that, we come down and we just click on Save Changes to apply that.
So we've now limited where we can sell and ship to. Next thing we can do is come back onto the shipping tab and we see we've got the shipping zones already set up and waiting for us.
Creating Your First Shipping Zone (UK)
So now we just click on add a shipping zone and we can now start setting up the shipping zones. Now you can work with shipping zones in a very broad sense or you can work with them in a very specific sense. And what I mean by that is we can name them anything we want, but when we cover the zones, if we want to start using this you can see we can come in and even though we chose Ireland and the UK, we can break this down to specific areas inside Ireland or the UK. If we scroll through, you can see we've got quite a few different Irish locations, we've got the UK. We can also limit to specific zip or post codes. This allows us to really get in and fine-tune exactly where we want to sell and how much it's going to cost to any of those locations. Let's keep this quite broad to start off with. Let's just say UK shipping. So we set that up. The regions you want to sell to, we can simply come down, scroll down to there and we say UK. So that's going to set that first shipping charge. We want to have one charge to ship to the UK and a different charge to ship to Ireland.
Configuring the Flat Rate Method
So once we've done that, we could say save the changes and now we can start adding in our shipping methods. So a first zone is set up, now we can set up the method. So we say add shipping method and in there we've got some options. We've got flat rate, free shipping, or local pickup. Now this depends upon what you want to offer. For us, we're going to be using the flat rate for this example. We'll choose flat rate and say add shipping method.
So once that's done, we've now added the flat rate in there, but we haven't actually applied any fee to that flat rate, so currently is sitting at zero. The next thing we need to do is click on flat rate and then we can come in and we can start editing the costs for that. So the first thing we've got to configure is the method title. So this is just a name that you want to give to this particular shipping method. You can put whatever you want in there, but obviously it makes sense to put something that's applicable to the charge and potentially the location. Next up we've got the option for is this a taxable charge, in other words do you apply tax to your shipping? If you do, you can set it to be taxable. This will then take that shipping method and apply tax to it. If that's not applicable to you, you can simply set that to be none.
And then finally we've got the cost. Now there's a couple of things we can do in here. We don't have to simply put in a simple flat fee, but for now we're going to do that and I'll come back later and revisit this, and we'll take a look at how we can use other methods or even some simple calculations or formulas to get a little bit more creative on how we set our charges. For now, let's just set this a flat fee of 2.95 and we'll click on Save Changes.
Adding More Zones and Free Shipping
So we've now created our very first shipping zone and our shipping method. To just commit those changes, let's hit Save Changes to make sure that all our settings are in place and saved before we move on to the next step.
So now that we've set up our UK-based shipping zone, let's go back and set up the one for Ireland. All we need to do is come back to shipping zones. You can see our UK shipping is now set up and created. It tells us the region is the UK and we've set the flat rate shipping fee. Let's add a second shipping zone in and this we'll call this Ireland shipping.
Regions, we know it's going to be Ireland. But like I say, if you wanted to filter this down to various different regions inside Ireland, you could do just that. Let's just choose Ireland, add our shipping method, the flat rate is correct, add shipping method again. But for this time, we're going to click to edit and we're going to set this one to be 4.95. So we've got a higher rate if you're based in Ireland, and we set that tax to be none and we'll say Save Changes.
So we've now created two shipping zones. If we come back at the shipping zone section, you can see UK shipping and Ireland are all set up. We've also got locations not covered by other zones. So if you were shipping somewhere else and you hadn't set shipping charges up for that, you could set a global flat rate up on there if you wanted to to ship to any other country that's not included in your shipping zones.
So now we've seen how to create our shipping zones, what if we wanted to do something that was for free shipping? Well, there's various different ways we could do that. Let's take a look at one simple option. Let's add another shipping zone in. I'm going to call this Free UK Shipping. We're going to limit this to be UK, so again, we'll come down, limit it to the United Kingdom. We could if we wanted to again limit this to post codes or zip codes, but for now we'll just leave that to be the whole of the UK.
Again, we'll just add our shipping method, but this time instead of flat rate, we're going to come in and we're going to say free shipping. Add our shipping method. So that now installs the free shipping option. Now if we come in and edit that, you can see everything looks the same as it did before except for the fact there's nothing on here about taxation because obviously we're looking at free shipping. But we have though is free shipping requires, we then have four different options: a valid free shipping coupon, minimum order amount, a coupon, and the coupon. Let's just choose the minimum order amount for simplicity, and we'll say if someone spends more than 50 pounds, or whatever currency you're working with, they'll get free shipping. So we'll save our changes and we've got another shipping method in there.
So if we jump back to our shipping zones, we now have free UK shipping. So if someone meets that criteria by spending more than 50 pounds in their basket, they will get access to free shipping, but only if they're in the UK. So hopefully what you can see is you can use these methods to very quickly build up quite a complex way of setting up shipping charges based upon various different criteria.
Stage 2: Advanced Shipping Rate Calculations
So that's basically stage one. We've created the shipping zones and the shipping methods and applied some basic rates to them. So now that we've gone ahead and seen how to set up the shipping zones and methods, the next thing we need to do is to go through and set up the shipping rates. Now we've seen how to apply free shipping. We've also seen how to set up a flat rate, but we're not limited to just flat rates. Let's take a look at how we can do a little bit more with that with the three different options we have: the flat fee per order, flat fee per item, and a percentage-based shipping option.
So let's come into our UK shipping, let's edit that, and then let's just open up our flat rate and edit that. Now you can see we set a value of 2.95 in there. So we know we've got a flat rate. So every time you order something with that flat rate, there's a flat single fee of 2 pounds 95 assigned as shipping. That's great if you only have one item to purchase or very small items, but if someone buys 10 of those items it can start to get a little bit unwieldy. And also probably means that your shipping rate is going to be nowhere near enough. So how do we cope with that? We can do a flat rate per item. So this is currently set as a flat fee per order. to do a flat fee per item is very, very easy. All we need to do is start using a simple formula inside the shipping setup.
So what we do is we use the square brackets and we put QTY for quantity, then close the square brackets. And then we use the multiply symbol. And what does this do? It says the quantity of items in the shopping basket will be charged at 2.95 per item. So by itself, that's pretty cool, but we're not limited to just very simple calculations. We can go a lot further. Now I'm not going to cover lots of different advanced costs in this, this is just a simple three-step process, but I just want to demonstrate that you're not limited to just plain flat fees or a quantity and a fee per item.
We can do things like set a flat fee and then add a per item charge on top of that. To do that, we are simply going to need to remove the current calculation, and if we insert our new calculation, let's take a look at what's going on. We are saying 10 plus 2 times quantity. So if you're familiar with formulas in Excel, this is going to make a little sense to you. If not, don't worry, it's not as complex as it first looks. What we're effectively saying is we want to charge a flat rate of 10 pounds plus 2 pounds per item on top of that. So if they only bought one item, it would cost them 12 pound. They bought two items, 14 pound, and so on. So for every additional item they have in their basket, it will charge them an additional two pounds or whatever currency you're working with.
Now hopefully what this demonstrates is that the actual power that you have available to you inside the flat rate shipping is a lot more extensive that you may first think. So just by using some simple formulas, we can create much more complex-based shipping charges.
Stage 2: Percentage-Based Shipping Rates & Demo
We've seen how to set a flat rate for shipping, we've seen how to set a per-item-based rate on shipping and also how to set a per item and a flat rate in combination. So this should give you a lot of functionality. There's a third method as well. We've got percentage-based shipping charges, and setting up percentage-based charges is pretty much the same as dealing with the costs with a flat fee. What we need to do is remove this, and we're going to use this simple example. So what we're saying is the cost of the items is charged an additional 10% for shipping. So if you had an item that cost a hundred pounds, the shipping would be 10 pounds. With 200 pounds, it'd be 20 pounds. So it's 10% of the cost of the cart. S o this is an easy way of being able to set up a percentage-based shipping, and obviously if you want to combine this with a flat fee on top of that, you could do all those kinds of calculations as well. But hopefully what I've demonstrated is that there's a lot more power under the hood of the flat rate shipping than you might have thought additionally.
So let's just save this change and let's take a look at this in action, see exactly how it works in your shopping cart. Save our changes. Everything else should now be in place. So we're going to do a chip off to our store and take a look at how this works. So we're into our shop and let's just add an item in. So let's just say we'll take this beanie. So we'll come down, we'll add that to our cart. Once it is added to the cart, we'll just jump over to take a look. You'll see there's our beanie at 18 pounds. And if we take a look, we've now got a flat rate shipping of 1 pound 80, in other words 10% of the cost. If we now set that to be two and update our cart, we'll now see that we have 3 pounds 60 as our flat rate. So again, 10% of the overall total of whatever's in our cart. It's very easy to use these kinds of shipping methods to build up quite complex shipping options throughout your entire store, also depending upon where you're shipping to, what country, what state, zip codes, post codes, all those kinds of good things. So you can get very creative and set up shipping charges that should match pretty much all of your requirements.
Stage 3: Introduction to Shipping Classes
So now we've set up the first two parts. The third and final part is to set up the shipping classes. Now this is something that's pretty much optional. If you don't have any need to set up additional charges on top of your flat rates, then you can basically bypass this stage. However, if you have items that basically don't fit into that pricing structure for sending them out, maybe heavy items and so on, then this is gonna give you the ability to quickly and easily add additional options without messing about with setting up multiple different rates.
And what exactly are classes? Well, let's just say for example you have an item that's very, very big or very heavy and will cost a lot more than your flat rate shipping charge. How would you cope with that? That's where shipping classes come in. We can assign additional charges on top of our standard shipping for specific items. And to access that, again, we're in the settings section of WooCommerce and we need to go over to shipping classes, select that. That'll take us through and we can now create our first shipping class.
So we're going to do is say add a shipping class. We've got three options. We've got the shipping class name, the slug, and the description. We only need to set two of these if you use shipping classes at all: the shipping class name, self-explanatory, what exactly is this shipping class, and the description, as its name would suggest, gives you a bit more detail over the name. The slug will be automatically created when you create your shipping class, but if you wanted to change that you could do to give it something unique. So let's just say we're going to give this name of heavy goods, and we're going to say this is heavy items class. So we'll say save our shipping classes. We've created that. As you can see, the slug is ultimately created.
Stage 3: Configuring Shipping Class Costs
And now that we've created a shipping class, we can now configure the details for it. So what we need to do is jump back over the shipping zones. Once you're back over there, we can now go through and set this up for any areas that we want to cover. So let's just start off with the UK shipping. We'll come in and edit that. You can see flat-fee, everything looks exactly the same as it did before. All we need to do is click on the flat rate and now we have some additional options. Because we've created shipping classes, we now have additional sections for those shipping classes. So you can see we've got our base cost, which is set up at the top, and this will apply to every single shipping option.
All we need to do now is add the extra charge on for this particular shipping class. So we're going to say that heavy goods, anything that fits into that particular shipping class is going to have an additional charge of 10 pounds applied to it. So you can see we can set that up. So that's our heavy goods shipping class. Underneath, we've also got no shipping class costs which we can apply if we want to, but for this example it's not relevant.
And then finally we have the calculation type. From here we can choose per class, which will charge the shipping for each individual shipping class individually, or per order, charge the shipping for the most expensive shipping class. So obviously you need to set whatever is relevant to your particular store setup. We're going to choose this to be the most expensive shipping class for example, and we'll say save the changes.
Stage 3: Applying and Testing a Shipping Class
So we've now created and set up and configured the amount of money to apply to a new heavyweight shipping class, but how do we use that? How do we assign it to anything? Well, we need to do is come in to the particular product or products that we want to assign this to and apply that shipping class. So let's come back into our products and say all products. We can take a look at everything inside our store and let's just choose something we're going to say is going to have this applied to it. So we're going to come down and we'll say, we'll keep it really simple, we'll say the beanie with logo. So we can edit that. Once that's loaded up, we scroll down and look under the shipping tab. You'll see we have shipping class. Currently there's no shipping class associated with this particular product, so it will just use the default cost per item to be shipped. However, if we want this to have a shipping class associated with it, we simply choose from all the options available. We've only got one, which is the heavy goods. We click on that, we've now associated that shipping class with it, and we'll say update.
Once that's updated, we can then take a look at this product. Let's preview this product and we'll see that in our store. So you can see there's our beanie with a logo, it's 18 pounds. so let's just add that to our cart, and let's go to our cart and take a look. So we can now see that our shipping rate is 15 pounds 40, because we've had that advanced shipping charge applied to the heaviest item in this particular setup, this particular order. So we've assigned that additional charge on top of our standard charge. I hope that makes sense. It can get a little confusing when you're just looking at figures and things on screen like this.
Conclusion and Next Steps
But like I say, what we're doing is we're setting this up that any item that has that more expensive heavyweight class associated with it, it will have an additional charge. So there we go, that's how we configure shipping charges inside WooCommerce. Hopefully this three-stage process has demonstrated it's not as complicated as first thought, but it's also incredibly powerful if you want to go beyond the basics of just some simple flat rate shipping.
Now, speaking of going beyond the basics, if you'd like to see more about these advanced techniques, check out this video. It's going to go into a lot more detail about how you can start to utilize these advanced techniques to actually work with shipping in WooCommerce. Now, speaking of videos, if you'd like to see more and get more out of WooCommerce and WordPress, check out some of the other great videos in this channel. We'll have some lists at the end of the video so you can check those out. As always, if you'd like to support the channel, please consider using those affiliate links in the description below. Cost you no more money but does give a small percentage back to the channel and help us create more content for you. As always, this is WP101. Until next time, take care.
