WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform with robust functionality. Thus, the question of how to set up flat rate shipping in WooCommerce holds considerable value. WooCommerce provides multiple options for creating shipping classes, enabling real-time shipping costs, and extending the functionality with WooCommerce shipping plugins.
But even without plugins, WooCommerce provides you with an extensive shipping system, which you can configure easily. In this article, we will discuss how to set up flat rate shipping in WooCommerce and also mention some plugins available in this category.
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Default WooCommerce Shipping Methods
Once installed, WooCommerce provides you with 3 default shipping options, namely:
1. Flat Rate Shipping
As mentioned above, in flat rate shipping, you can set a standard price for each parcel depending on its size, dimension, or location. This could be beneficial for simple calculation and management but could end up with your customers paying more for shipping in your store than other options.
2. Local Pickup
With this option, customers can pick up their orders themselves from the nearest physical location of your store. This saves the customers from additional shipping costs and reduces shipping hassle for business owners, but is not a viable option if you don’t have a retail location.
3. Free Shipping
This option is the most favorable for your business as it leads to increased conversion rates. You can offer your customers free shipping through coupons, popups, and much more to increase sales.
Since we are focusing on WooCommerce flat rate shipping in this article, let’s discuss some more on what it means. Flat rate shipping refers to the fixed price, based on conditions like size, weight, time, etc. which are set on a parcel. For example, a parcel less than 1kg would cost you $5. Now, this price can be changed depending on the shipping address, required delivery date, and much more.
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How to Set-Up WooCommerce Flat Rate Shipping
Below we have listed the steps of how to set up flat rate shipping in your WooCommerce store.
1. Set a Shipping Zone
A shipping zone defines the geographic location of your WooCommerce store and helps you set different shipping costs for different locations and pickup points for your customers. To do this, go to WooCommerce > Settings > and click on the shipping tab. From there, click on the “add shipping zone” button. Now, you need to set a zone name and choose a zone region from the dropdown menu.
2. Add Shipping Method
Next, you have to add the shipping method for the shipping zone and since we are discussing flat rate shipping, that’s what you will choose. You can also add multiple shipping methods for each shipping zone.
For the WooCommerce flat rate shipping, you need to set the title, choose if it’s taxable, and add the amount. You can make further configurations in the “shipping options” tab to show/hide billing addresses, enable real-time calculation, and much more.
3. Applying Flat Rate Shipping
Once your flat rate shipping method has been created, we can apply it per item, order, and shipping class.
You can charge flat rate shipping per item by configuring WooCommerce built-in options. Just select the shipping method and change the calculation type to per item. Thus, your customers would have to pay $20 for shipping if they have 4 items in their cart, depending the flat rate is set to $5. Similarly, you can choose the other options, that is per order or shipping class, and enable different types of flat rate shipping on your store.
And that’s it! WooCommerce flat rate shipping is extremely flexible and you can create as many flat rate shipping methods as you want and set different priority levels to each so customers can choose their desired option.
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3 Best WooCommerce Flat Rate Shipping Plugins
If you want to add more advanced WooCommerce flat rate shipping options to your site, then the following 3 plugins are best for you.
1. Flat Rate Box Shipping
With the WooCommerce Flat Rate Box Shipping plugin, you can offer your customers different sized boxes based on the weight and volume they can carry and specify different flat rate shipping costs for each box.
Key Features
- You can define the cost of boxes based on shipping zones.
- Set a flat rate shipping cost for items that cannot fit in a box.
- Define the cost of boxes based on the item’s weight and volume.
- Define the box sizes and if they are taxable or not.
To download, click here.
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2. Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method
This is the ultimate WooCommerce flat rate shipping method plugin that can add and create multiple shipping rules for your online store. This will be beneficial for our customers can you can offer them a wide range of shipping options. You can create shipping methods based on the product, category, user role, and much more.
Key Features
- Allow/restrict shipping methods based on conditional rules such as time, payment method, etc.
- Product, location, cart total, and user-based shipping rules are applicable.
- You can enable free shipping when the cart total reaches a certain amount.
- Apply maximum/minimum, highest/lowest, or tiered-based flat rate shipping.
- You can show shipping methods to logged-in customers only.
To download, click here.
3. Flat Rate Shipping Plugin for WooCommerce
This is a flexible and powerful flat rate shipping plugin for WooCommerce. You can create multiple custom flat rate shipping methods based on conditional rules. These rules could be based on the product, category, cart total, quantity, and much more. You can also manually arrange which shipping methods will be displayed first.
Key Features
- Enable/disable to calculate tax on a shipping method.
- Set flat rate shipping methods based on zone, postcode, state, and country.
- Display shipping method in a dropdown menu or by radio buttons.
- Enable free shipping based on cart threshold amount or coupon amount.
To download, click here.
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Final Words
By configuring WooCommerce shipping settings, you can enable multiple shipping methods on your WooCommerce store. WooCommerce flat rate shipping method is considered advantageous as the costs are pre-defined and can be further specified using conditional rules. It also diversifies the shipping options and increases customer satisfaction. Moreover, by choosing the above-mentioned WooCommerce flat rate shipping plugins, you can add advanced shipping methods and configure them accordingly.
