In this article, you will learn more about the following:
- Enable shipping for your store
- Adding a shipping origin
- Adding and editing shipping zones
- Enabling carriers
To get started, you will want to navigate to Settings -> Shipping on the left sidebar menu.
Enable shipping for your store
If your store sells items that require shipping*, the first thing that you want to do is enable shipping. Just click the Enable Shipping button and you are ready to get started with configuration.
* Important: Please note that even if you offer free shipping for all of your items, you still want to enable shipping. Otherwise, your customers will not be asked for a shipping address on checkout and you will also be unable to take advantage of our fulfillment features in the order management system.
Adding a shipping origin
After enabling shipping, the first thing that you need to configure is your stores shipping origin address. This is the address that your items ship from. Click the Add Shipping Origin button highlighted below.
Then just fill in the form with your shipping origin address and save.
Adding and editing shipping zones
We are now ready to start configuring shipping zones. You will see that your store will automatically be provisioned with an example United States zone with a test USPS by Stamps.com carrier account connected.
To add another shipping zone, just click on the + Add Shipping Zone link at the top right of the section. Or to edit the existing zone, just click on the name of the zone as shown on the left below.
If you click on the existing United States zone, you will see in the first section that you can change the name of the zone and you can add or remove countries form the Region field.
In general, you want to make sure that your zones cover all of the countries that you intend to ship your products to. If you have a group of countries that you will use the same shipping carrier and service levels for, you can group those countries in one zone.
The next section allows you to enable free shipping. You can also optionally enter a minimum order value for free shipping eligibility. If this is enabled and your customer meets any minimum order value that you set, they will see during checkout that shipping is free.
In the next section, you will see the USPS test carrier and service levels. To edit or delete this carrier from the zone, you can use the Edit or X links just to the right of the carrier name. If you would like to connect a different carrier for this zone, click the Connect Shipping Carrier button.
If you click the Edit link for the USPS test carrier, you will see that you can use the checkboxes in the left column select which service levels. If you want to make the names of the service levels that your customer sees in the checkout process generic, you can enter a value in the Name for Checkout field that will override the carrier's service level name.
It is a best practice to limit the number of service levels to just a few to avoid confusing your customers when they are selecting the shipping option during checkout.
Just below the service level selection, you will see that there is an optional rate adjustment setting. If you want to mark up the calculated shipping rates by a percentage or flat fee, you can enter those values in this section and the calculated shipping rates will be adjusted according during checkout.
Enabling carriers
On the main shipping settings page, you will see the Shipping Carriers section below, which allows you to connect any of the supported carriers. You will need to have established an account directly with each of the carriers that you want to use. When connecting a carrier, you will be asked to enter specific information from the account you established with that carrier.
This section also allows you to activate the USPS by Stamps.com account that was provisioned as a test carrier into a live account. Doing this will automatically retain all of the carrier settings in any existing zones that have your test USPS account connected.
That's everything that you need to know about shipping settings. Next we will go over configuring your store's Payment Settings.