Shipping
Zones and rates, the free-shipping trap on a store with no zones, and where labels come from.
Zones
Settings → Shipping holds one or more zones. A zone is a set of places and the rates you offer to someone with an address in them.
The most specific zone wins, so you can be as coarse or as fine as you like without the zones needing to know about each other:
- A country and region, e.g. California
- A country, e.g. the United States
- Rest of world — your catch-all
Add rest of world last, when you are ready to ship anywhere. Until you do, anywhere outside your zones cannot be checked out to at all, which is the right answer for a country you do not ship to and a nasty surprise if you left one out by accident.
Rates
A rate is what the shopper sees and picks at checkout. There are four kinds:
| Kind | What it does |
|---|---|
| Flat | One price, always |
| Free over | One price, and free once the order is big enough |
| Weight bands | A price per band of total cart weight |
| Order-value bands | A price per band of order value |
Start with one flat rate per zone. That covers most stores on day one.
Four rules worth knowing before you price anything
- "Free over £50" means £50 of actual spend. Discounts come off before the threshold is tested, and tax and postage are not counted toward it. A £60 cart with a £15 discount does not qualify.
- A cart eCrate cannot weigh is not priced by weight. Weight is a field on each product variant and most people never fill it in. If any item in the cart has no weight, the whole cart is unweighable, and a weight-banded rate falls back to reading its bands as order-value bands instead. It never guesses zero — guessing zero would hand every such cart your cheapest band.
- A banded rate that matches no band is simply not offered. If your bands stop at 10 kg and the cart is 40 kg, that rate disappears from checkout rather than inventing a price. If that leaves no rates at all, the shopper is told so — they are never charged nothing by accident.
- No price is ever calculated. Every figure a shopper is charged for postage is a number you typed. Nothing is multiplied, and nothing is rounded.
Locations
Settings → Locations is where your stock physically is. Most stores have one and never think about it again. If you hold stock in more than one place, each location tracks its own quantities.
Fulfilling an order
Open the order and mark it fulfilled when it goes out. The customer is emailed automatically, and a tracking number you add goes in that email.
Live carrier rates and labels
Buying labels through eCrate and quoting live carrier rates at checkout are not switched on for this eCrate. Use the rates above and buy postage the way you do now — the tracking number goes on the order and reaches the customer in their shipping email.
One more thing
Shipping can be taxed, and whether it is depends on where the shopper is. Each tax jurisdiction has its own switch for it — see Taxes.