If you are building a Woocommerce website, you will need to decide which Woocommerce shipping options to use. This seemingly simple task is the pitfall in many ecommerce website projects, so decide carefully.
Free shipping
Avoid the hassles of shipping and set all shipping costs to free. You can keep this affordable for your store by adding the shipping prices directly into the cost of the product. Now you have an added marketing bonus because all your shipping is free. Customers are more likely to make a purchase with free shipping.
Flat rate
Set your product shipping costs to a flat rate for each object. The fewer varieties of shipping costs, the better. A flat rate payment structure makes it easy for the customer to make decisions about final cost.
The smartest way to use flat rates is to identify a flat rate shipping program you intend to use. Then break your shipping options into those sizes and prices. USPS Priority Mail is an inexpensive and trusted solution. Check out their flat rate box sizes.
The standard flat rate shipping options are just for the United States.
International
International Flat Rate is for all orders outside the United States.
Local delivery
If you sell products to local customers, you might want to allow local delivery. This would be best for restaurants, or other businesses with the need for local delivery, and a delivery system that already exists. Setup your shipping zone using zipcodes, and configure your delivery fee.
Local pickup
If you sell products locally and your clients come by the store often, allow local pickups. This encourages customers to come back into the store.
Table rate shipping
This is the secret software to achieve all your shipping goals. The issue many people experience is that other shipping configurations work 99% of the time, but 1% gets weird shipping prices for certain location anomalies. Due to the 1% problem, those shipping options are usually not used.
Table Rate shipping fixes this dilemma by allowing you to configure variations for those 1% problem situations. In our example, the 1% who would get weird shipping prices can be corrected to a more reasonable cost.
More than one shipping option
You can setup more than one shipping option at a time. This gives your customers the choice to choose a shipping option.
Having many shipping options can be great in certain situations, but don’t go overboard with setting up shipping options. This will only lead to more work and management in the future. A well thought out shipping strategy saves so much time for ecommerce businesses.