You can give your customers real-time carrier rates at checkout by connecting your Online Store to a carrier company such as USPS, FedEx, UPS, Australia Post, Canada Post, etc.
Shipping rates will be calculated in real-time based on the order weight, product dimensions, and delivery address.
Before you connect
Before connecting a carrier for real-time shipping quotes, follow these steps:
- Mark products as shippable and enter product weight and dimensions. More information on product dimensions: Tutorial
- Enter the product weight and tick the Requires shipping or pickup setting for the products that you are going to ship.
Tip: To choose another weight unit for your store in your Online Store admin, go to Settings > General > Regional Settings > Weight & Size.
3. Enter the shipping origin address. Most often, it’s the location from where you ship your orders. It will be used by integrated carriers as a ship-from address for calculating real-time shipping rates.
Shipping origin is the Company Address specified in your Online Store admin at Settings > General > Store Profile during the initial store set up. Make sure that the right address has been entered there.
Tip: If you are shipping products from another place, specify that address as your shipping origin to receive precise shipping quotes from the carrier enabled in your store.
Set up destination zones
Destination zones are geographical areas where you ship your products to. You can offer different shipping methods for customers from different destination zones, for example, ship via USPS within the continental United States and ship via FedEx to the Hawaiian Islands.
You can also choose not to ship to certain areas. If a customer enters a shipping address that is not included in any of your destination zones, they will see the “Sorry, we do not ship to this location” error.
Learn more about setting destination zones in this tutorial.
Real-time rates from integrated carriers
Online Store has a built-in integration with the following carrier companies to automatically show their shipping rates for customers’ orders at checkout:
- UPS
- USPS
- FedEx
- Canada Post
- Royal Mail
- Brasil Correios (Brazil)
- MDS Collivery
- Australia Post
- EMS Russian Post
To enable the automatically calculated rates in your store:
- From your Online Store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup.
- Click Add Shipping Method.
- Select the carrier company that you ship with. The carrier companies are suggested depending on your country. Click Set up.
- If you don't see the needed carrier among the suggested options, you can either view all carriers or change your country below.
- Choose Automatically calculated rates from the chosen carrier and click Set up.
If you are going to ship worldwide and offer all the available shipping options from the set carrier, no additional setup is needed.
The default World destination zone will be applied to an enabled shipping method, which means that buyers from any location can place orders.
Also, popular shipping options of a carrier will be pre-enabled (for example, U.S.P.S. First-Class Mail®, U.S.P.S. Priority Mail™, etc).
Edit shipping settings
If you are going to ship orders within a certain area and you want to offer particular shipping methods at checkout, you can edit the settings of the shipping method.
- Click Actions > Edit next to the set carrier-calculated option.
- In the Shipping options section, enable the rates you want to offer at checkout and disable those you don't need.
Changes are saved automatically.
Changing the destination zone
To select the geographical area where the shipping method can be offered:
- Click Actions > Edit next to the set carrier-calculated option.
- Select a destination zone from the Shipping region drop-down under the Shipping settings block.
- Click Save.
Congratulations! You have successfully customized your real-time shipping settings.
This feature is available on all Online Store plans.