How To Add Shipping To WooCommerce

Shipping plays a crucial role in creating your brand identity for your users. Users always expect a high-quality and fast shipping process against the prices they paid. An easy and enhanced shipping process creates a seamless and satisfying experience for your users. So, it’s important to have a fine shipping strategy in place. Luckily, WooCommerce offers various inbuild shipping methods with added features that provide customers with clear shipping rates and several other options. In this blog, we will talk about different WooCommerce features and how to use them to add shipping to WoCommerce. 

Shipping Methods in WooCommerce

WooCommerce offers vast features for building an online store. You can choose from both built-in features and extensions or plugins to set up your shipping method. However, the default primary shipping rate and method from WooCommerce provides a shipping calculator on the cart page. You can also choose a shipping location and link a shipping method to that location. 

If you just installed WooCommerce, you will get the following default shipping options. If you want to extend or have more options, choose from WooCommerce extended shipping plugins and features for more flexibility. 

• Flat Rate: With this option, you can charge a single rate for all the shipping that goes out of your store. It makes a simple and flexible price plan for you and your customers. Although, this can lead to you or the customer paying an increased shipping cost

• Free Shipping: As the name suggests, with free shipping, your customers need not pay any shipping charges. This is usually done through coupons or when a customer spends a minimum amount for a product. 

• Local Pickup: Local Pickups are usually free for customers and they can pick up their products without any external shipment services. However, these pickups require a physical location of your store to handle and ship the products.  

How To Add Shipping To WooCommerce 

Now that you are aware of shipping methods to choose from in WooComerce, let’s see how you can add these shipping methods to your store:

Create a backup of your store

Before making any changes to your WooCommerce store, you need to back up all your data to avoid losing any valuable information. You can either use a backup plugin from WordPress to automate your store backup or just manually back up your site from the store’s dashboard. Once the backup is complete, update your website, store, current themes, and plugins to ensure enhanced compatibility. 

Structure WooComerce Settings 

If you offer the three default options of Free Shipping, Flat Rates, and Local Pickup you will get it all built-in WooCommerce. There are no additional plugins required for the setup. 

Install and Activate Shipping Extensions 

To add more flexibility to your shipping methods, add and activate the extended shipping features in WooCoommerce. With these, you can use features like table rates, live rates, or a combination of shipping methods. These plugins will help improve your store functionality like tracking numbers, label printing, and warehouse syncing. 

• Navigate to Plugins on your WordPress dashboard and select Add New 
• Select Upload Plugin 
• Now select the extension ZIP file on your system and click Activate to enable the plugins on your store 

Modify the Shipping Settings 

Every extension you chose comes with different settings and instructions. To find specific instructions for your plugin set-up you can navigate to its main page and click on the Documentation button for extension-specific setup. 

Here you can get detailed instructions broken down into different categories like Shipping Labels, Tracking information, and Managing packages. This way you can adjust your settings to meet your store requirements easily.

Test your New Shipping Process in WooCommerce

Before implementing your new shipping process for your customer, test the waters and see if your shipping setup is working smoothly. 

• You can start by testing a product from each shipping class and check if the rates are calculated correctly on your cart and check-out pages 
• Check if the combination of products and different cart sizes is applied properly 
• Examine the entire checkout process and see if the shipping information is synced correctly
• If you are using live rates, do your costs for customers match your carrier’s rates?
• Are your shipping and return policies easily available on your site for the customers? 
• See if your discount offers or free shipping rates are visible to your customers 

If everything above looks good on your store, you can go ahead and make your new shipping process live for your customers. 

Conclusion 

WooCommerce is ideal for affordable, flexible, and great shipping methods to add to your store. With its inbuilt features, you can create a user-friendly and satisfying experience. Now you can configure your WooCommerce Shipping settings and know how to add shipping to WooCommerce. In addition, you can learn and test your store to figure out your shipping method compatibility with your customers and store.