Setting up Australia wide flat rate shipping is a great way to get started with the Shipping component, it's simple and gives you an understanding of all the areas involved.
Prerequisites
To keep this article simple and easy to understand, we won't explain how to add Shipping Companies or Shipping Regions here, however they 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 to instructions on how to do this.
Shipping Regions
Setting up the Shipping Regions can be a short or long process depending on how you're setting up your shipping rates. For this example, we only need to create a single Shipping Region which is very quick, simply take a look at Adding an Australia-wide Region for instructions.
The following instructions assume the Company and Regions described in the articles above have been added, and the Shipping Methods described below are being added to that Company.
Adding the Shipping Method
- On the Shipping Overview page you'll find a list of the Shipping Companies that have been added so far. Click on the "Add Method" button for the new company you added.
- The following fields are required for this Shipping Method:
- Name and Method Description: These fields are both required and display information about this Shipping Method to customers in the checkout. A common setup is for the Name of the field to contain the shipping provider, such as Australia Post, and for the Method Description to describe the shipping service, such as Standard or Express Shipping.
- Domestic: Leave this box checked as this Shipping Method is handling shipping to domestic locations only.
- Selected Domestic Regions: Select the "Australia - (0-9999)" entry from Available Regions and then click on Add Selected. After a few moments the selected Region will move over to the Selected Regions section.
- Calculation Method: Choose Flat Rate for this example.
- Flat Rate: Enter the Flat Rate price that customers will be charged for shipment to anywhere in Australia.
- Active: Leave this field checked if you want customers to see this option in the checkout.
- Click Save and Close to add the Shipping Method.
Now that you have added this shipping method, whenever someone places an order being shipped to Australia and the postcode they supply is between 0 and 9999, this shipping method will appear for them in the checkout at the price you specified in the Flat Rate field.
Other Shipping Examples
This example is just one of many possibly ways to setup your shipping rate calculation. If you'd like to look at some other common methods, take a look at some of the links below: