Getting live rates works very well for shipping small- to medium-sized packages. It doesn't work very well when you want to ship something large such as furniture or something heavy such as sand. You'll most likely have to contract a shipping provider that doesn't have a plugin and you'll have to create your own rates. That is exactly why Table Rate Shipping exists—for such custom scenarios.
One of the things Table Rate Shipping is very good at is having different pricing rules for different geographic regions. If you deliver furniture you most likely have a rate for local delivery, another rate for delivery in the state, another rate for out-of-state purchases, and a rate for international sales. These can be very easily set up with Table Rate Shipping.
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 that is done. You'll need to have weights set for all of your products. You'll also need the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin (available on WooThemes.com) installed and activated on your site.
The first thing we need to do is create zones for the different areas we're delivering to. For creating Shipping Zones, we need to perform the following steps:
- From the WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce | Shipping Zones.
There's a default zone, which we'll leave in place. We can configure that default zone with pricing rules later. First, we need to create the rest of the zones.
- Enter a Zone Name.
- Under Type of zone, select This shipping zone is based on one or more countries.
- Start typing United States in the country box and select the correct suggestion:
- Click on Add shipping zone.
We need to create two more zones. One based on the state and the other based on the zip code. I'll be using Denver, Colorado, as an example.
- For the state, you need to repeat the process we gone through earlier along with making sure you select This shipping zone is based on one of more states and counties for the Type of zone setting and then type in your state name.
- For deliveries in your city, it's best to work with zip codes. Make sure you select This shipping zone is based on one of more postcodes/zips for the Type of zone setting. You can easily target multiple zip codes by using ranges or wildcards. For example, 80201-80209 or 8020*.
Now that we've created all of our shipping zones, it's time to configure them with rates.
- Start with any zone you like, hover over the name of the zone, and click on Configure shipping method:
- Add a new table of rates to that zone by selecting Table rates and then clicking on Add To Zone:
- Click on the title of the table of rates to edit it.
With furniture being all sorts of different sizes, we're going to use weight to come up with a cost.
- Leave Calculation Type as Per order.
- Click on + Add Shipping Rate.
- Fill in the rate. In our case, we're going to create three different tiers: 0-100lbs, 101-300 lbs, and 301+ lbs, all with different prices. In the following screenshot, we will fill rates as per these three tiers:
- Click Save shipping Method when you're done.
- Repeat this for each zone.
That's a lot of work but we've created some very custom shipping rates based on weight and destination.
There's a lot in Table Rate Shipping. We could write a whole chapter on the many different ways you can use Table Rate Shipping but that's not the best use of space. To see some more examples on the official documentation page refer to http://docs.woothemes.com/document/table-rate-shipping-v2/.