Adding Precise Postcode Regions

Adding Regions to your Company is the second step in any domestic shipping setup, and depending on your shipping rate calculations the necessary number of entries could range from as low as 1 up to a few hundred. For this example, we'll partially cover the process of entering the postcode regions provided by a shipping provider.

Prerequisites

To keep this article simple and easy to understand, we won't explain how to add Shipping Companies here, however one will need to be added before the example in this article can be followed.

Shipping Company
Setting up the Shipping Company is a quick and easy step, you can review the Adding a Shipping Company article for instructions on how to do this.

Understanding Shipping Company Zones

Adding the regions from a shipping company can be time consuming due to the number of regions that need to be added, but the process itself is very simple. Here is a small example from the Australia Post Domestic Parcels Guide, this is similar to what other shipping companies will provide you with:

The data you've received from your shipping company should be in a similar format to the above. A State, followed by a list of corresponding postcodes and the zone name assigned to each postcode range. This is all you need to setup your regions for that company.

Adding the Shipping Regions

1. On the Shipping Overview page you'll find a list of the Shipping Companies that have been added so far. Click on the "Add Region" button for the new company you added.
2. You'll need to complete all the fields on this page as follows:
   • Country: Select Australia.
   • State: Select the state for the current postcode range being added.
   • Region Name: Enter the name of the Region or Zone for this postcode range.
   • Start Post Code: Enter the first postcode in the range here.
   • End Post Code: Enter the last postcode in the range here. If the range includes only a single postcode, enter that value here too.
3. Click on Add to finish adding the region.

Continue this process for each of the postcode ranges you have been provided with. To use Australia Post as an example, the end result is having a small list of region names (such as V1, V2, N1, N2) each with a vast range of postcodes assigned to them. When it comes time to assign rates to these postcodes, you can simply select the corresponding zones (V1, V2 etc.).

Next Steps

Now that you have a shipping company with a precise list of postcode ranges you can setup or weight based shipping for that region:

• Precise Postcode Shipping by Weight

If the above shipping calculation methods aren't what you have in mind, you can consider one of the following region setups instead:

• Adding an Australia-wide Region
• Adding State-by-State Regions