Setting Up Shipping Rates For Your Zen-Cart Store

Easy To Follow Tutorial on Setting Up Postage / Shipping Charges in Zen-Cart

We are frequently asked by clients to assist them with setting up the Shipping Module within their new Zen-Cart e-commerce site. Whilst there are some good Tutorials within the Zen-Cart support site the feedback we get is that they do not go into enough detail for new zenners to achive a fully working shipping module configured exactly to their requirements.

So we thought we would post a very quick tutorial that hopefully gives an easy to understand step by step guide to configure the shipping module in what appears to be the most frequently requested format of ‘per item’ postage rates with some additional notes that will assist if you require a ‘per weight’ configuration.

As the majority of our clients are U.K. based we are posting this quick Tutorial for configuring Postage Rates on a ‘per item’ basis that can also be used as a ‘per weight’ configuration as long as all of the store products have weights defined within their respective details. We are therefore using U.K. as the Zone 1 or ‘Home Zone’ for shipping calculations and Europe as Zone 2 and then the Rest Of The World as Zone 3. If you are only shipping to one zone (Zone 1) then this is still relevant as you can set your zen-Cart store not to ship to certain countries which will be covered later. Before you start, you should have the postage costs that you intend you charge to hand for the configuration that you require. The most common settings are the following:

1. Cost per individual item shipped to your Zones 1, 2 and 3 countries, this setting will charge a set cost for each item in the buyers cart, so if they purchase 3 items in one transaction their shipping will be 3 X whatever your rate is.

2. Scale of charges that increases with a discounted rate the more items that are purchased eg. one item costs £2.00, three items will cost £3.00 and then four items cost a total £3.75 to ship.

3. Set costs per multiple items, such as a shipping cost for 1 to 3 items, then a different charge for 4 -6 items and so on.

Getting Started with your Zen Cart Shipping Module

Step 1

Once you are in your Zen Cart Admin Control Panel firstly go to Configuration and in the pull down list that displays, choose the ‘Shipping & Packaging’ option. Here you need to ensure that you have defined your Post Code and if you are setting your shipping costs by weight, then ensure you define your Maximum Shipping Weight and Your Package Tare Small to Medium settings (The Package Tare Small to Medium option is best set to 0 unless you really need it or you will get some odd shipping rates). Then in Zen Cart Admin click on the Modules Tab in the NavBar and then choose the ‘Shipping’ option from the pull down list of modules you should get a page like this.

Step 2

Now we are going to start configuring the options available within this module.

Next step is to click on the ‘Zones’ option and then click ‘Edit’, a window will then appear that looks like the one on the right.

Then, you need to turn the module on by clicking the ‘Enable Zones Method’ on, and then choosing which Calculation Method that you intend to use, remembering for this tutorial we are configuring the module on a ‘per item’ basis.

We are also ignoring the Tax Classes as this is usually not required unless you are shipping to certain States in the U.S.A. as an example.

Step 3

Now we need to add the shipping rates that we intend to use on our e-commerce store.

In the next box, we have the facility to insert the country codes for the countries that we don’t want to ship to. Any country inserted into this box will result in a purchaser from that country seeing a message on their checkout page stating that the store does not ship to their country and they will not be able to complete the checkout process unless they change their shipping address to an acceptable country.

In the next box down titled ‘Zone 1 Countries’, you need to add the country ISO or short code(s) for your Zone 1 Shipping country, in our example configuration it is GB.

The next box titled ‘Zone 1 Shipping Table‘, requires you to input your actual shipping rates, in our example, we are charging on a ‘per item’ basis but we also want to give our customers a little discount for multiple item purchases, so we have set our costs using the following configuration:
1:2.99,2:5.49,3:7.99,4:9.99,10:10.99
This basically translates as 1(one item) seperated by a colon then amount to be charged, then seperated by a comma and repeated for each number of items you want to set rates for ensuring that you have your colons and commas in the right places.

In our example we have set the following rates: one item £2.99 charge, two items we will charge £5.49, three items £7.99 and so on, you will also see that after the shipping price setting for 4 items our next number of items is 10. This will mean that if somebody has between five and nine items in their cart at the checkout stage on our store then they will be charged the same rate of £9.99. We have also left the highest number of items as 10 which will mean that any customer with ten or more items in their cart will be charged a flat rate of £10.99. So using this as an example you could define your rates however you like with your charges set on any number of individual item amounts or in ‘bands’ of multiple items or as in our example a ‘cap’ on your shipping charges such as a flat rate for over a certain amount of products purchased within one transaction.

If you want to apply a ‘handling’ fee you can insert the amount into the next box down titled ‘Zone 1 Handling Fee’, this will then apply the amount you specify as a fee to each order made on your store. If you do not wish to charge this type of fee then just leave the box set with the default ’0′ which means this fee is switched off and won’t feature on your site.

This Step is then repeated for the ‘Zone 2′ and ‘Zone 3′ sections using the rates you wish to charge for these zones. If you are not sure of the ISO codes that you need for the countries that you are prepared to ship to the a full list can be found here ISO Country Codes.

Shipping Rates by Weight

If you need to set your shipping rates by weight of the items sold then obviously all of the products on your site will need to have their weights defined within the product details or your shipping estimator and checkout pages will not function properly.

The ‘by weight’ configuration is more or less the same as the ‘per item’ method as described above but you will need to click the ‘By Weight’ option referred to in step 2 and depending on the weights of your products you define your charges using the same example ‘Shipping Table’ quoted above, only the initial numbers are your weight units instead of items.

For example, using our Shipping Table
1:2.99,2:5.49,3:7.99,4:9.99,10:10.99
Any number of items with combined weights that do not exceed one weight unit (lb / Kg) will cost £2.99 to ship. Any number of items combined that do not exceed two weight units will cost £5.49 and so on.

We hope that this may be of use, if there is something that isn’t explained clearly enough or you require further elaboration then please feel free to drop us an email or leave a comment here where we will be happy to respond.