When Woocommerce Version 2.6.1 was published to the world it brought along Shipping Zones. These were implemented to make it easier to control shipping costs. The old woocommerce shipping system is now being removed, thank goodness, as it was pretty awful.
Up until this latest update, people have had to use plugins to control shipping costs to different zones, especially in the UK where it costs a lot more to send to the Highlands, Islands or the Channel Islands than to mainland UK.
We recently completed a project for Finer Stables. They design and deliver custom-built stables. These can be huge structures and often vary in size. The main problem they had on their old website was a customer had to ring up and find out how much delivery would be and this was causing a lot of phone calls that were unnecessary.
The main problem was delivery to Birmingham was completely different to Southhampton, so implementing a delivery charge for different UK zones just wasn’t going to work, so we set about creating a shipping zone for every UK postcode.
You can find the official guide from Woocommerce, in case my instructions don’t make sense to you- they provide a handy video: https://docs.woothemes.com/document/setting-up-shipping-zones/
- Within WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping, click the Add a Shipping Zone button
- Name the Zone – I have used the postcode town
- Type in the Region, in this case, United Kingdom and click the Limit to Specified Postcodes link which opens an additional input box
- Add all the postcodes from that Zone or town in this case, one per line and each should end in * so it’s always the first letters and *
- If you need the postcodes for the UK, they can be downloaded below in a format that can be copied and pasted, and they already include the * at the end of each line.
- Repeat steps 1-4 for all the UK postcodes
One of the problems when I first set it up was if someone was in Leicester they kept getting charged Liverpool’s delivery charge and this catches a lot of people out and took me a while to figure it out. As Liverpool postcode starts with just one letter L* in the Woocommerce system this gets confused with all the postcodes beginning with L so for every single letter postcode you have to put every postcode in that area into the system.
Download the list of postcodes for all of the UK postcode ‘zones’ by clicking here
If you have set up independent delivery zones for each postcode you should start to have something like this. As you can see their postcode is set up then within each postocde you can choose a flat rate shipping with a single delivery cost, also you can include Free Shipping & Local Pickup.
Setting up Shipping Costs & Free Shipping for each of the Zones
Again, You can check out the offical documents if I dont make any sense: https://docs.woothemes.com/document/flat-rate-shipping/ and https://docs.woothemes.com/document/free-shipping/
It’s possible to set up different prices for the zones if there are choices (like standard/next day etc) – if you’re offering free shipping, choose Free Shipping when you get to number 2 of the instructions.
- Within WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping, click into each zone (Postcode Town) and you will see shipping methods and add new methods
- Here you have three options Flat Rate, Free Shipping & Local Pickup
- If you choose flat rate and click into it
- Change the title (if you want) it will be seen on the front-end checkout page.
- Change the ‘Taxable’ field if you don’t add tax to your shipping costs
- Add the cost of the shipping and save the changes
- Repeat 1-6 for all the Shipping Zones and Shipping Methods you want to add
Extra Help
If you’re struggling with setting up Woocommerce, I am a website designer in Leicester, feel free to get in touch using the form below. We’re happy to provide advice if we can, or we can even provide an estimate for setting it up for you.