While free shipping is great, not all stores can have the markup required to give away free shipping to all orders. You could connect to a shipping service and get live quotes from them but that takes extra work getting an account and making sure all of your products have weights and dimensions. An easier option is to set up Flat Rate Shipping, which gives you the option of estimating costs by providing a per-order cost with an additional per item cost. For many stores this is good enough and even for stores that want to have more complex options, it's good to try out the basic options first.
Make sure shipping is enabled on your site. See the Setting a minimum order amount to unlock free shipping recipe in this chapter to see how this is done.
In order to configure Flat Rate Shipping, have a look at the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce | Settings | Shipping.
- Click on Flat Rate.
- Check the Enable this shipping method setting.
- We're going to add a per-order cost that should cover most of our shipping costs. In our case we're going to have a per-order cost of $8. Set the Cost per order setting to 8.
This works great for people who order a small handful of items. However, some users will order dozens or hundreds of items. We want to take those cases into account.
- Under the Additional Costs section set the Costs Added… dropdown to Per Item - charge shipping for each item individually.
In the Costs table right beneath that setting, we need to add a cost per item.
- Under the Cost column add a per item price of 2:
- Click on Save changes.
At this point, you have a pretty solid Flat Rate Shipping method. We're going to take it one step further by presenting users with a flat rate as well as an express shipping rate, where we charge users a premium for the rush service.
- Under Add-on Rates, you can add an additional rate by setting this: Enter Rush Order | 15 | order. This should give the user the option of upgrading to a rush service for an extra $15 when choosing shipping options. Have a look at the following demonstrative screenshot:
