In this article we are going to talk about the basic shipping options for your WooCommerce online store. Before we do that we are going to encourage you to consider free shipping. It is increasingly becoming a customer expectation so it’s certainly worth thinking about it as an option.
Free Shipping
Will you offer free shipping? In your country or internationally? If you aren’t ready to offer free shipping yet, do a quick check and see what your competition is doing.
For your customers, free shipping may offer simplicity and a significant perceived benefit. If you research this topic you may find evidence that persuades you. Or seeing successful competitors offering free shipping might do the trick.
But for you, free shipping may mean hard work. Hard work to figure out how to price your products and manage all the possible permutations. The important thing to remember is that free shipping can remove a potential barrier to a sale. A recent report by the Baymard Institute shows unexpected shipping costs triggered 61%* of cart abandonments.
WooCommerce make several options available to you.
Some of standard shipping methods available from WooCommerce include:
- Free Shipping: free shipping for selected countries. Optional minimum order threshold. Optional free shipping coupon codes.
- Local Delivery: fixed rate or percentage of order shipping fees for a defined set of postcodes.
- International Delivery: rate for international (defined set of countries) shipping. Fixed rate per item, class of item or order. Optional fixed or percentage handling fee.
- Local Pickup: allow customers to pick up goods.
- Flat Rate: define a standard shipping and optional handling fee per item, class of item (e.g. Small, Bulky) or order.
These can be configured by your web developer during the building of your online store. You can also configure these yourself.
In addition, there are further options for shipping that involve the use of WooCommerce Extensions – a fee may be payable for the extra configuration involved with these extensions.
- Table Rate Shipping: define shipping rates by location, zone, price, weight, or item count.
- Per Product Shipping: individual shipping rates can be set per product.
- Australia Post: shipping cost calculated automatically from Australia Post lookup based on height/width/length of products in cart and shipping origin/destination. Shipment tracking for Australia Post also included.