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How you choose to ship your products is a key element to the management and success of your store. You must account for the great variety of available methods, which can mix carriers, regional and international taxes, package weight and the price of a product itself. Luckily, PrestaShop makes it easy for you to handle it all in just a few screens.
Shipping price is basically calculated using either of two methods: order total price, and order total weight. This is how most carriers calculate their shippings fees, and this is why you should fill-in the weight setting when creating a product in the catalog, and also why you absolutely must indicate the per-weight and per-price costs for each carrier
The shipping settings work closely with the local settings of your PrestaShop installation. While in PrestaShop some of these settings were also found "Shipping" tab, in PrestaShop 1.5 all local settings have been moved in a new tab, named "Localization". This is where you will be able to edit geographical zones, countries, currencies, etc. Therefore, make sure to have a serious look at the "Localization" tab, which is explained in the next chapter of this guide, "Understanding Local Settings". For instance, in order to create a complete carrier in PrestaShop, you must have clearly defined your geographical zones; this is done in the "Zones" page under the "Localization" tab.
Shipping
The more general settings of you shop's shipping configuration are found in the "Shipping" page, under the "Shipping" tab.
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The three sections of this page provide global settings:
- Handling.
- Handling charges. Enter the per-order handling expenses, which will be added to the final purchase price. This is separate from your shipping costs: it is really the cost of you or your employee having to fetch the products, package them and have them shipped. If there is no such cost, leave it at 0.
- Free shipping starts at. Enter the price or weight after which your customers will receive free shipping. For instance, you might choose to offer free shipping when the order exceeds $250. If you do not want to offer free shipping, leave these values at 0.
A message will appear to your customers indicating how much more money they need to spend in order to receive free shipping. If you
- do not want this message to appear, type 0 into the fields.
- Billing. Choose whether you are calculating the shipping costs by total price or total weight. This is the default settings, which can be superseded by each carrier setting.
- Fees. View and edit the shipping fee for each of the carriers added to your store. See below.
That last section is extremely important, as this is where all your shipping settings come to meet, and where you enter the actual shipping fees. After you have created carriers, price ranges and weight ranges, this seemingly harmless section will be the tool to use to make them all work in conjunction with an actual price.
Assigning Shipping Fees
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Having correct shipping fees is very important, so make sure not to skip this setting. Unless of course if you only sell downloadable products. |
Once you have created all your carriers and set all the weight and price ranges for these carriers (with the "Carriers", "Price Ranges" and "Weight Ranges" page under the "Shipping" tab, which are fully explained later in this chapter), it is high time to set their shipping fees per range.
When selecting a carrier in the drop-down menu, PrestaShop displays a table with the shipping fee per weight range and per geographical zone
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, tax excluded. The default value is "0.00", which is certainly not what you will want to leave as this pretty much means "free shipping, whatever the weight". You must therefore precisely set the shipping fees for each zone and range, as provided by the carrier itself, or as estimated by you. For instance, if you are sending packages from the US, the fee to Europe might be double or triple the domestic fee.
An empty field has a real impact on the availability of the carrier in the matching zone:
- If the fee per range is the same for all zones, simply fill the field for the "All" row, and leave the others empty.
- If the carrier does not ship to a certain zone for a given range, leave that field empty.
If the selected carrier has no weight range set, you cannot assign fees to that carrier; you must first create weight ranges for that carrier, in "Weight ranges" page under the "Shipping" tab (see below).
You must perform this for all of your carriers.
Carriers
You must have carriers added to your PrestaShop installation – that is, a clear indicator of who will deliver your products. It might be just yourself or your shop (for instance if you are selling downloadable products, or only work locally), but as soon as you are actually sending packages using stamps and a 3rd-party delivery such as your local postal service, or FedEx, UPS and such, then you must have their details added to your shop's database. This will enable you and your customers to better choose which carrier to use, based on their delivery ranges, fees and dates.
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The "Carrier" page presents you with a list of all your current carriers. From there, you can directly change their status, indicate whether they are included in your "free shipping" discounts, and change their position when presented to customers.
By default, you only have one two carrier in your database: your
- Your own shop
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- : this represents your physical store, where customers can supposedly come pick up their products themselves. It has no price range nor weight range set.
- "My carrier": This is a sample carrier and should not be used in production. It has one price range (from $0 to $10,000) and one weight range (from 0 kg to 10,000 kg).
It is up to you to remove that these default carrier carriers and add new ones for your customers. At the very least, you should edit the "My carrier" carrier and replace its data with that of a real carrier: name, details, and ranges.
The "Carrier options" sections gives you access to 3 settings, which impact the front-office in order to help the customer make a choice:
- Default carrier. If you have more than one carriers in your system, you might want to promote one to your customers.
- Sort by. When customers are presented with a choice of carriers, you can choose to either sort the list by shipping fee or by their position, as set with the list above.
- Order by. This enables to set the order in which order the carrier sorting happensare sorted:
- If sorted by shipping fee and with an ascending order, then carriers will be displayed from the cheapest to the most expensive.
- If sorted by position and with a descending order, then carriers will be displayed from the top position of the list, to the bottom position.
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In this section, we are going to create a complete carrier, from A to Z. You can create as many carriers as you wish.
If one carrier has different shipping services, you should create as many carriers in PrestaShop, and differentiate them with their names.
Note: Many of the details asked by PrestaShop's forms should be provided by your carriers once you have set up an account or are under contract with them directly. Check with them in order to make sure everything is configured correctly.
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Remember that you can create as many ranges per carrier as needed, so if a carrier can handle more than one, but each in a different way, you should create the complete set of ranges.Once the ranges are determined and allotted to a carrier, you can define the shipping and handling for each range. Go to the first page of the "Shipping" tab, and fill out the table found at the bottom of the page. Here is an sample bill according to the total price of the order.
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Make sure to not have the ranges overlap! Therefore, the "To" value of a range should not be equal to the "From" value of the next one. For instance, if one range ends at $20, the next one should start at roughly $20.001. Likewise, if you have to add a range before one that starts at $20, the new one should end roughly at $19.999. |
Weight Ranges
Carriers can be set to accept orders within a given weight range. For example, if you want orders between 1 lbs and 15 lbs to be sent by the US Post Office, create a weight range from 1 to 15, and set it to "US Postal Service".
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Remember that you can create as many ranges per carrier as needed, so if a carrier can handle more than one, but each in a different way, you should create the complete set of ranges.
| Tip |
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Make sure to not have the ranges overlap! Therefore, the "To" value of a range should not be equal to the "From" value of the next one. For instance, if one range ends at 20 kg, the next one should start at roughly 20.001 kg. Likewise, if you have to add a range before one that starts at 20 kg, the new one should end roughly at 19.999 kg. |
Once the ranges are determined and allotted to a carrier, you can define the shipping and handling for each range. Go to the first page of the "Shipping" tab, and fill out the table found at the bottom of the page. Here is an sample bill according to the total weight of the order.
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