Table of contents

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.

To configure your shop's shipping, head to the "Shipping" tab of your Back Office.

Right from the Shipping page, you can set some global options.

The "Fees" section enables you to see the shipping fee for each of the carriers added to your store. 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.

Carriers

You must have carriers added to your store – that is, a clear indicator of who will deliver the product. It might be just yourself or your shop (for instance if you are selling downloadable products, or work locally), but as soon as you are actually sending packages using stamps and a 3rd-party delivery service integrated with PrestaShop, or FedEx, UPS and such, then you must have their details added to your store's database. This will enable you and your customers to better choose which carrier to use, based on their ranges, fees and delivery dates.

By default, you only have one carrier in your database: your own store. It's up to you to add new carriers for your customers.

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 with them directly. Check with them in order to make sure everything is configured correctly.

Creating a New Carrier

Click on the "Carriers" sub-tab, and click on the "Add New" button.

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

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.

Countries

Country

PrestaShop must know all existing countries in order for customers to clearly indicate their own.

At the bottom of the page, you can set the default country for your shop.

Normally, PrestaShop comes with all current countries in the database. But in the scenario that new ones appear, you would need to add a new country. Click "Add New" to do so.

States

By "States", PrestaShop calls first-level administrative divisions of a country. In the United-States, they are called states; in Italy, it's regioni (singular: regione); in France, it's régions (regions); in the United-Kingdom, it's regions. By default, PrestaShop provides you with a set of states: the 50 US states, the 13 Canadian provinces and territories, 24 Argentinian provincias, and 110 Italian province (singular: provincia).

Having states properly defined in your database helps better represent the delivery possibilities of your carriers. It is therefore important to enter all of a given country's administrative divisions if they are important to your carriers. You can find a list of such divisions on this Wikipedia page.

Note: the PrestaShop address form currently only lists states are available for the customer to choose. Therefore, make sure to use a sensible list when adding content to your states list. That is the reason why, for instance, the list contains Italian province rather than regioni.

Let's create a new state. Click "Add New" to get to the creation form.

Zones

PrestaShop's zones are a list of the world's subregions. It helps categorize countries.

If needed, you can create more zones, by clicking, as usual, on "Add New".

All you need is a name and a status.

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".