PrestaShop 1.5
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Managing Shipping

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.

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".

Shipping

The more general settings of you shop's shipping configuration are found in the "Shipping" page, under the "Shipping" tab.

The three sections of this page provide global settings

  • Handling. Enter the handling expenses, and the price or weight after which your customers will receive free shipping.
    A message will appear to your customers indicating how much more money they need to spend in order to receive free shipping. If you don't 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 .
  • Fees. View and edit the shipping fee for each of the carriers added to your store. When selecting a carrier in the drop-down menu, PrestaShop displays a table with the shipping fee per weight range and per geographical zone. If the selected carrier has not weight range set, the only range displayed is from 0 to 10,000 kg (10 metric tonnes, or roughly 22 046 lbs). You can edit the fees right in the table, then save.

    Having correct shipping fees is very important, so make sure not to skip this setting.

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.

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 carrier in your database: your own shop. It's up to you to remove that default carrier and add new ones for your customers.

The "Carrier options" sections gives you access to 3 settings:

  • 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 in which order the carrier sorting happens:
    • 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 shipping fee and with a descending order, then carriers will be displayed from the top position of the list, to the bottom position.

Creating a New Carrier

In this section, we are going to create a sample carrier, from A to Z.

Note: Many of the details asked by PrestaShop's forms should be provided by your carriers once you have set up an account or contract with them directly. Check with them in order to make sure everything is configured correctly.

Let's examine all of the information you need to enter:

  • Company. Fill out this field with the name of your carrier and/or a description of the service (for instance, you could fill in "PrestaPost – 500 lbs and over")
  • Logo. Add a logo so that your customers can easily choose between different carriers.
  • Transit time. This is displayed to customers during checkout. It will help them select their carrier according to the amount of time they want to wait to receive their shipment.
  • URL. This field must be filled with the tracking URL provided by your carrier. For example, France's postal service (La Poste) offers this URL: http://www.colissimo.fr/portail_colissimo/suivreResultat.do?parcelnumber=@ . When customers select their carrier, they will be sent the URL that you enter into this field, which they can click to track their delivery.
  • Zone. Indicate the customer's zones in which this carrier is available (the zones where the carrier can make deliveries).
  • Group Access. Select which customers groups will have access to this carrier.
  • Status. Include or exclude this carrier in your shop's list of carriers.
  • Shipping & handling. Include the shipping & handling costs in the carrier's price
  • Tax. Indicate if this carrier requires a tax in order to deliver to a certain zone.
  • Shipping & Handling. Include or exclude shipping & handling costs in this carrier's price.
  • Out-of-range behavior. In case you have left out a range for an order, you can indicate how the software should react. You have two options:
    • If the software doesn't find the range it needs, it will take the largest configuration and apply these conditions.
    • Otherwise, it will not offer this carrier because it cannot deliver this order.
  • Finally, save your newly-created carrier.

Here is an example of out-of-range behavior: Let's say you have set up a weight range from 0 to 10 lbs. Your customer wants to place an order that is 15 lbs., and no behavior has been configured for this weight. By choosing "Apply the cost of the highest defined range", PrestaShop will apply the price conditions that you have set up for orders from 5-10 lbs. If you choose "Deactivate the carrier", then this carrier will not be offered to the customer in this case.

Price Ranges

With PrestaShop, you can add a unique shipping & handling price to each total purchase price range.

For example, if you want orders between $1 and $15 to be sent by the US Post Office with a special rate, create a price range from 1 to 15, and set it to "US Postal Service".

Weight Ranges

The process for defining weight ranges is exactly the same as that of defining price ranges.

For example, if you want orders between 1 lbs and 15 lbs to be sent by the US Post Office with a special rate, create a weight range from 1 to 15, and set it to "US Postal Service".

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 we have taken as an example the bill according to the total weight of the order.

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