Providing the necessary shipping options is a crucial part of your WooCommerce store’s success. If your online store does not have their desired shipping option, the customers will not hesitate to leave your site and continue shopping from elsewhere.
In order to avoid these situations, you need to find out which WooCommerce shipping options are most desired by your customers and provide them in your site. There are lots of add-ons and extensions for expanding the default shipping options of WooCommerce which can help you in this regard.
In today’s post, I will introduce you to some advanced WooCommerce shipping tips and tricks for your store. Continue reading to find out which they are.
1. Remove Calculate Shipping from Cart Page
For various reasons, you might need to remove the shipping options from the cart page. For example, if you are offering free samples of your products, you will definitely not need any shipping options. The same thing goes for the digital download stores too. As the customers will download the digital products, no shipping option is necessary for them. Some WooCommerce site owners complain that the shipping rate ruins the alignment of the price amounts in the shopping cart page.
One thing is common in all of these scenarios – they don’t want the shipping options in the cart page. Unfortunately, WooCommerce does not provide a native solution for removing the shipping options. However, Rodolfo Melogli provides a simple solution for doing that in this Business Bloomer tutorial.
2. Restrict Shipping for Specific Items, Countries or Payment Gateways
Making the shipping option restricted for a specific product, country or a payment gateway is an advanced shipping cart customization feature for WooCommerce. You can do this by purchasing the WooCommerce Conditional Shipping and Payments extension. This extension allows you to create single or multiple conditions to control the shipping options.
The shipping method restrictions could be attached to a specific product and/or product category. Alternatively, you can create separate rules for special products to comply with the customs and carrier rules and regulations.
Based on the shipping method selected by the customer, you can choose to enable or disable various payment gateways. This will help you to manage issues like minimum transaction limits, billing country availability etc. Last but not the least, you can create country restrictions for specific products to comply with the customs and/or any other local regulations.
3. Multiple Shipping Flat Rates
Unless your WooCommerce store serves within a small city, it can be assumed that your customers are located in different parts of the country, or all over the world. In that case, it is not logical to apply the same shipping charge to a customer living in the next city and another customer living in another country.
If you ship your products to different countries, you should offer multiple shipping rates based on the location, product dimension, weight etc. The Table Rate Shipping extension lets you do that in your WooCommerce site. The powerful extension lets you create shipping zones with specific options. By using this extension, you can easily offer multiple shipping flat rates for your customers.
4. Local Pickup
Another handy shipping option for your WooCommerce site would be to enable local pickup. In this method, the customer will pick up the product from your warehouse or store. This could be a win-win situation for both. While you will be saving valuable time and money on shipping, the customer can easily pick up the product from the closest location and get the product quickly. To sweeten the deal, you might offer a small discount for local pickups.
However, WooCommerce does not come with the local pickup option by default. To enable this, you need to purchase the Local Pickup Plus extension. The powerful extension allows the customer to configure single or multiple pickup locations and display the pickup location(s) in the customer account.
5. Shipment Tracking
Once a customer has ordered a product, he will be eager to get it delivered as soon as possible. In order to ensure him, you can enable the shipment tracking system for his order. This could be done by purchasing the Shipment Tracking extension. This will allow the customer to track the shipment.
Once the necessary information is provided, the tracking information will be displayed in the emails, order view and the order tracking pages of the customer’s account. By default, the extension supports all the popular providers including DHL, Fedex, UPS, USPS, TNT, Royal Mail, Canada Post and Australia Post.
6. Shipping to Multiple Addresses
Sometimes, your customers may request you to ship their products to different locations. This happens especially during the holiday seasons. This convenient shipping solution will definitely enhance your customers shopping experience. In order to provide this facility, you need to purchase the Shipping Multiple Addresses extension. This extension will allow the customers to split the delivery address for their purchased products.
Once you have purchased and installed the extension in your WooCommerce site, it will start working automatically. Your customers can instantly place order for multiple products and have them delivered in different locations.
7. Verify the Shipping Address
If you have ever tried to deliver a product to an invalid address, you definitely know the pain and frustration of getting back the product and re-sending it to the correct address. You can make sure this doesn’t happen again by using an address validator. The Postcode/Address Validation extension will let you do so in your WooCommerce site.
Available for orders shipping to the USA, UK and New Zealand, the Postcode/Address Validation extension will not accept an invalid address for any of these countries. Besides avoiding the hassle of delivering the product to invalid location, this will also allow you to ensure timely delivery for your customers.
Conclusion
While WooCoomerce is a solid platform for creating fully-featured online stores, your customers will demand different types of shipping options. I hope the advancedWooCommerce shipping tips and tricks described above gave you some solid idea about the possible shipping options for your website.
Let me know which tips sound most interesting to you. And if you have any other WooCommerce shipping tips, feel free to comment below.