Shipping costs are the second reason carts get abandoned, right after payment. It is not the amount that drives people away, it is finding out about it at the end. WooCommerce handles this well, as long as you understand the three pieces it is made of.
The three pieces
| Piece |
What it is |
| Shipping zone |
A set of places you deliver to: a country, a province, a group of postcodes |
| Shipping method |
The pricing rule inside that zone: flat rate, free, local pickup |
| Shipping class |
A label you put on products to price them differently within the same method |
A zone can hold several methods, and the buyer picks one. A product can carry a class, and the method charges accordingly. That is all there is to it.
Creating your first zone
| 1 |
Open WooCommerce, Settings and Shipping.
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| 2 |
Click Add zone. Give it a name that makes sense to you, because the customer never sees it.
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| 3 |
Pick the regions. Start with the city or province you genuinely deliver to, and widen later.
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| 4 |
Add a shipping method to the zone and set the price.
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| 5 |
Repeat for the next zone. Anything outside all your zones falls into Locations not covered: if you do not want to sell there, leave it with no methods.
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| 6 |
Save, then simulate a purchase with an address from each zone.
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The methods that come as standard
| Method |
How it works |
| Flat rate |
One amount per order. It accepts simple formulas to charge per item or per shipping class |
| Free shipping |
Can require a minimum order value, a coupon, or both |
| Local pickup |
No delivery charge. The customer collects. Use the instructions field to say where and when |
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Local pickup is the most underrated one. In a city, plenty of buyers would rather collect the same day than wait for a delivery. It costs nothing to enable and it spares you the whole logistics problem at the start.
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Weight, dimensions and classes
| 1 |
Check the units first. Under Settings and Products you pick the weight unit and the length unit. Get them the wrong way round and everything else follows.
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| 2 |
Fill in weight and dimensions on every product. Without them, any weight-based calculation returns zero.
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Create classes only when you need them. One class for fragile items and another for light ones, say, then a different price for each inside the flat rate.
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Undercharging for delivery comes straight out of your margin. Before fixing the amount, weigh and measure three real orders and ask the price from whoever will deliver them. A round number invented in a hurry tends to get expensive by the hundredth order.
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Products that are not shipped
If a product is ticked as Virtual, it stops counting towards shipping. An order made up only of virtual products never even shows the shipping step. That is why services and files should always be marked virtual, however small a detail it seems.
Who does the delivering
WooCommerce ships with no automatic integration for local carriers, and most carriers around here do not offer one either. In practice the normal route is to arrange things with a courier or a transport company, charge a flat rate per zone, and handle order tracking outside the shop, by phone or over WhatsApp.
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State the delivery time on the product page itself. Not in the footer, not in the terms: on the page where the person decides. It removes half the «has it shipped yet?» messages.
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