A shipping zone is somewhere you deliver to, and the rates inside it are what you charge to get an order there. Every store draws its shipping options from these zones, so setting them up once serves your online stores and your branded stores alike.
Select Online Store in the left-hand menu, then Shipping Zones, then Create Shipping Zone. Give the zone a name your customers would recognise — the area it covers, not an internal code — and set its Status to Active.
Then say which addresses the zone covers, using the country, state and postcode tools on the zone, or by drawing the area on the map. This is the part that is easy to forget, and a zone without it is the commonest reason a customer reaches the checkout and is offered no shipping at all: an order is matched to a zone by the delivery address falling inside one of its areas, so a zone with a name and a rate but no coverage is never offered to anybody. A zone left on Paused is skipped for the same reason.
Adding a rate
Open the zone and select New Shipping Rate. A zone can hold as many rates as you need, and the customer is offered the ones their order qualifies for.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Shipping Rate Name | What the customer sees at checkout. Say what they are getting — "Standard delivery, 3 to 5 days" tells them more than "Standard". |
| Type | Delivery sends the order to the customer. Pickup means they collect it, and is normally free. |
| Currency | The currency the rate is charged in. |
| Base Rate | The flat charge for this option. |
| Weight Rate | An additional charge based on the weight of the order, for when a flat rate would not cover a heavy parcel. |
| Minimum Order Price / Maximum Order Price | The order value band this rate applies to. Use them to offer different options to small and large orders. |
| Free Shipping Price | The order value at or above which this rate costs nothing. |
Getting the bands right
The order value bands are the part that most often goes wrong. Every possible order total needs at least one rate that covers it, or a customer reaches the checkout with nothing to choose and cannot complete the order. When you have finished, read your rates as a list and check the bands touch: if one rate stops at a hundred and the next starts at a hundred and one, an order of exactly a hundred and a half falls through the gap.
Leaving Minimum and Maximum empty makes a rate apply to any order value, which is the simplest way to guarantee there is always something to choose. Many networks keep one such catch-all rate in every zone for exactly that reason.
Removing a rate or a zone
Deleting a shipping rate is permanent and Gorilla Dash asks you to confirm it. Orders already placed keep the shipping they were charged, so removing a rate affects only what future customers are offered. Before deleting a zone, check that another zone covers the places it served, or customers there will find they cannot order at all.