Shipping is one of the most important factors that affect people’s purchase decisions. Free shipping always attracts people to purchase the products without a thought. In contrast, higher than expected shipping costs will discourage people from buying and increase cart abandonment.
Thus, a convenient and comprehensive shipping policy should become your supreme priority because it helps you score extra points with your customers and keep them coming back to your store.
You should make your shipping policies beneficial for your clients and for your company too. For example, give your customers discount on the shipping costs if they purchase a certain number of products, or allow free shipping for certain zones near your store. Or provide low shipping cost if they purchase products from certain categories.
You can provide more such benefits to the customers by setting different shipping rules on your store. We will be discussing how you can set different shipping rules for WooCommerce using advanced shipping plugins.
WooCommerce Default Shipping Methods
There are over 3 million online stores which use WooCommerce. And the majority of the stores sell physical products, where shipping is the most important component of the order process.
WooCommerce provides three default shipping methods which can be added for different shipping zones based on the different regions. Shipping zones feature was introduced in WooCommerce version 2.6, prior to that only 5 shipping methods were provided.
The default shipping methods are:
- Flat Rate
- Free Shipping
- Local Delivery
These are the basic shipping methods which only have the option to add shipping costs if applicable. It does not have an option for complex shipping rules. Like allowing shipping costs based on the product shipping classes, weight, price, number of items in the cart, and so on. The only benefit is that it can be added to different shipping zones based on the country, state, or postcodes.
There are many plugins which help you to set up complex shipping rules. Let’s look at 4 such plugins and free versions of them below.
WooCommerce Advanced Shipping Plugins
1. Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Plugin For WooCommerce
Price: $99/Single site license, $149/5 site, $299/30 sites
This plugin will help you configure shipping rates on your store based on advanced shipping rules. You will be able to create multiple flat rate shipping methods and better options for customers based on a range of different parameters. The plugin will help you optimize your shipping strategies, and consequently ensure better profitability and customer experience.
This flat rate shipping for the WooCommerce plugin brings the next-level of flexibility to shipping costs, enabling you to easily create and customize multiple flat rate shipping costs. You can calculate costs based on product, weight, quantity, country, category and a whole lot more. you can try their free plugin.
Some of its key features are:
– Advanced flexibility for configuring shipping costs
– Create multiple flat rate shipping methods
– Add specific Product, Category, User role, Country and more
2. Table Rate Shipping by WooCommerce
Price: $99/Single site license, $149/5 site, $299/25 sites
Table Rate Shipping plugin extends the WooCommerce default shipping options. It allows adding different shipping costs based on shipping classes, price, weight, item count for the same class or item count for all the classes.It also, allows you to set priorities for different shipping classes based on which shipping costs will be available on the checkout page. With all these features, this is probably the most widely used plugin for handling advanced shipping possibilities.
If you want to set different delivery schedules for each of the shipping options set from the Table Rate Shipping Plugin, you can check out our Order Delivery Date Pro for WooCommerce plugin.
3. WooCommerce Advance Shipping plugin by Jeroen sormani
Price: $18
This plugin allows you to enable Shipping methods during checkout based on set rules. Rules can be set for different cart details, product details or different user details. For example, if the country selected is the United Kingdom or if the quantity if greater than 2, then allow the shipping method.
This plugin is also made compatible with our Order Delivery Date Pro for WooCommerce plugin. You can add different delivery schedules for different shipping options from advanced shipping plugin.
Free Version: WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping by Jeroen Sormani
This is a free version of WooCommerce Advanced Shipping plugin. The only difference with both the plugins is that this plugin allows only free shipping method for set rules and paid plugin allows all shipping methods.
This plugin is installed and active on around 20,000+ web stores. And have approximately 70+ 5 star reviews.
Related Article: How to Configure Flat Rate, Free Shipping & Table Rate Shipping in WooCommerce
4. Flexible Shipping Pro for WooCommerce by WP Desk
Price: $79/Single site license, $149/5 site, $229/25 sites
This plugin allows you to enable shipping method based on the particular item, cart line item, price or weight rules. It has an option to show the shipping methods only to the logged in users and not to the guest users. Also, you can opt if you want that a particular shipping method should be selected by default on the checkout page or not. It also requires the lite plugin to work.
Free Version: Flexible Shipping for WooCommerce by WP Desk
This is a free version of the Flexible Shipping Pro for WooCommerce plugin. It allows setting shipping methods only for the price and weight.
This plugin is installed and active on around 10,000+ web stores. And have approximately 10+ 5 star reviews.
Related Article: Understanding WooCommerce Shipping Zones and Methods
Conclusion
Apart from some features, all the plugins are near to be same and beneficial. If you only want rules based on the prices you can use the lite plugins from the list, or if you want complex rules for different product/shipping classes, you can try the paid plugins.
Choose your advanced shipping plugin and let us know how beneficial it is for your WooCommerce store.
I hope this quick go through of the plugins for advanced shipping rules will help you to set up beneficial shipping policies for your stores.
If you want to set different delivery schedules for these shipping options, you can check out our Order Delivery Date Pro for WooCommerce plugin.
It’s also worth mentioning Trackmage plugin. It is what I was looking for. It allows my customers to see where their package is without asking me and redirecting them to 17track (awful site full of ads and NOT responsive).
I have a question. Client sells pies. She wants an addon/upcharge for custom message on top of pies – The only catch is, if you’ve added the custom message option, the pies can no longer be shipped. Anyone have any ideas how to add conditional shipping options based on addon selection from a product?