WooCommerce Shipping

Want to enhance the profitability of your business by selling products through an e-commerce website? WooCommerce shipping contributes a lot to your online store’s success.

Today’s consumers who shop online want to pay the best price for the products while getting them delivered to their doorstep in the shortest span of time. 

But how to start with WooCommerce Shipping?  

Get to know the shipping method basics and fulfillment at first. Then determine the right shipping technique and implement it inside your online store with the following steps:

Back-Up and Upgrade Your Online Store

Is your online store live? Don’t forget to back it up before making any upgrade. When you back up, it prevents the chance of losing important data and order details if any mishap occurs suddenly. 

To find the right option, you should test out various shipping options. You can use a staging site to make things easy for customers. 

You may use Jetpack Backup as it allows the site owner to restore or download a backup of the website at a specific time. You may choose from real-time backups and automatic daily backups for a once time daily snapshot. These are the two plans which are available that updates the site whenever customers place an order. 

If you want, you may take backup of the website manually and restore it immediately from the dashboard of the online store. When you have a backup, you must update the WooCommerce, WordPress, the WooCommerce theme, and all the plugins on the site to ensure compatibility with all the new extensions you add later.

Adjust WooCommerce Settings

WooCommerce is built with all required facilities including free shipping, flat rate shipping, and local pickup. So, you will not require any kind of extension or plugin. 

Navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping in your dashboard that contains your options for Shipping Zones. A shipping zone is a geographical area(defined by zip codes, states, regions, and countries) that you ship your products to. Set up a shipping zone to determine various rates depending on customer locations. 

You need to set up different shipping zones in the WooCommerce platform. When you want to implement the shipping methods to the shipping zones, click on “Add Shipping Method”. From there, select Free Shipping > Local Pickup > Flat Rate. Select the options and pricing as you want.

Calculate rates depending on the shipping classes that are groups of the same products. If you want to sell craft products, you can charge the fair rate for each item and also offer free shipping for bigger kits that include different products and supplies.

If you run a restaurant, you may charge them for shipping packaged food along with offering them free regional pick-up for meal kits. Choose the Shipping Classes tab and build whatever classes you want. Edit the products you want to sell and assign them to a specific class. To finish the WooCommerce settings configuration, set the shipping rate for every class in your shipping zone settings.

Install and Activate Shipping Extensions

Use live rates, and table rates. You may also opt for combination shipping methods. You will need a shipping extension to be able to add more options. Extensions are also perfect to add functionalities such as warehouse syncing, tracking numbers, and label printing. 

You may buy or download from the WooCommerce Marketplace if you want to integrate any specific extension to the site. After you purchase or download the extension, navigate to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard and select Upload Plugin. Go to the extension ZIP file on your computer and enable it on the store by clicking on the Activate button.

Configure Shipping Settings to Fulfil Your Demand

Every WooCommerce extension has its own settings, so the instructions differ from one to another. To see relevant instructions for your extension, navigate to its page in the WooCommerce Marketplace and click on the Documentation button in the right-hand column to walk through any extension-specific setup.  

Documentation for WooCommerce Shipping

Instructions are distinguished by categories in the documentation for WooCommerce Shipping. The categories are like Managing Packages, Tracking Information, Shipping Labels, etc. This will include screenshots in a detailed manner and the steps to find what you are looking for.

Whenever you face any complication, the support team will help you anytime. You should contact a professionally qualified team and the shop owners via WooCommerce forums who can help you during the setup process. 

Test Your Shipping Configuration

You must ensure a thorough testing of all the shipping configurations before making any new shipping configuration. 

Here are the things you need to do for testing:

• Ensure to test every product from every shipping category to all the shipping zones that you have set up
• Check if the rate calculation is done properly on the Cart and also on the Checkout pages
• Test combinations of products and various cart sizes. Also check if the free shipping options and the discounts are applied correctly or not.
• Browse the full checkout process. Check if your shipping information is synced correctly with a third-party tool like ShipStation.
• Test if tracking numbers attached to customer emails are available on account pages when you have set up tracking information
• Also, check the cost which is displayed to users also match with your carrier rates if you use live rates. 
• Think of your shipping and return policies that are easy for customers to find on the e-commerce website.  
• If you are about to offer any exciting or free shipping on order size or volume or if the information is visible to website visitors. If you find everything is fine, then you are good to go.

Enjoy WooCommerce Shipping from Now Onwards

WooCommerce shipping is growing popular because of its convenience and other benefits. This e-commerce platform comes with all the required tools to ship products efficiently, quickly, and easily on time to customers.

So, start doing WooCommerce shipping and keep your customers happy for life!