How To Setup Shipping On Shopify
In this video I walk you through step by step how to setup shipping in Shopify. Shipping is one of the most intimidating sections of Shopify but it doesnt have to be.
Lets walk through each block and see what is does, how it impacts your store and the recommended setting for each.
- Hey there, it's Brandon and in this video we're gonna talk about one of the most intimidating and potentially challenging sections within Shopify. And that is the shipping and delivery.
We're gonna go through it block by block, take a look at each section, give you an overview and then get into some details and setting up your rates and shipping zones. By the time you're done with this video, you're gonna feel much more comfortable in setting up your rates before shipping within Shopify. So let's go ahead, let's jump right into our Shopify store. Go ahead and get into your admin screen.
On the bottom left, click on settings. You'll see within the settings menu here, right about towards the middle is shipping and delivery. Go ahead and click on that. So here we are in the shipping and delivery section. There are a whole bunch of blocks. And we start out the very top one, is manage rates. Now I've deleted out all the rates that were preset in the theme or in the Shopify store. So if you have some information in here, if you want you can completely delete it, if you wanna follow along, or you can just edit them. I wanted to start from totally blank screen so that you can see how we can set up rates and set up different zones for shipping. This top section here, labeled shipping, we're gonna come back to this. This is where most of the detail in the video is gonna be about. But before we do that, I wanna go through the rest of the screen and just talk a little bit about each section so you know what it is and why it's there. This shipping section has quite a bit in it. So right below the shipping, you're gonna see the option for local delivery. So first off, you'll notice here that this address, this doesn't match up. So if it's not showing your location address, you can go here in your settings options and set up your locations.
I recommend you do that. So the locations could be your physical store address, it could be your warehouse. Or anywhere that the item is going to be shipped from. That way you have the right address, the right zip code, so that any automated calculations that are taking place will be able to be calculated correctly. In addition, setting up locations is important if you have more than one when dealing with inventory. But for now, for shipping, if you only have one location, make sure it's set up there and it will reflect in here. This local delivery, it seems pretty simple to set up and it is. It gives you a lot of options, like setting a radius.
So if you wanna offer local delivery to people who are within five miles, 10 miles or 20 miles, you can do that. You can do some customization with that. So if you're doing local delivery, now what do they mean exactly by local delivery? That's if you're making the delivery yourself, not giving it to a UPS driver who's then making the local delivery.
No, this is if you're making that delivery and you wanna let people know that hey, when you purchase it, I can make the delivery for you if you're within these constraints, within this radius. There's some other settings as well. So that's the local delivery. Right below that is local pickup. This became extremely popular with the pandemic and everything shutting down. Especially for in dining or shopping in store. Where you can let people know, "Hey, you can purchase it and you can come to my location "and pick it up." Same thing, you wanna make sure you have your location address correctly in there. You can set up the times that you'll be available. And some other details for local pickup. You can mix and match that also with local delivery. So you could have delivery and pickup options available to people. Below that section here is the packages. So if you create your own custom packages and want to load those dimensions in there for future use, this is the section that you would do that. So let's go ahead and click add package. And you get this screen here. So you can give your custom package its own name. You can pick the type of packaging that you're doing and put the dimensions in here as well. I highly recommend you put the weight of you packaging material. If you're putting the weights in for your products and you have the weights in for your packaging material, it makes the shipping much more concise in calculating the total weight of the item that's going out. So if you can put that information in there, perfect.
Another thing in this add package that I think is kind of hidden, is you can select carrier package. Now what's nice about this is is you already use USPS, when you click on it, it shows all the available packaging from USPS with the dimensions and with the packaging weight already set up in there. So you don't have to worry about figuring all that in or manually adding it. You can just come in here and select the packages that you may be using from USPS. And they'll automatically be added in. I do wanna let everyone know, if you don't already know, you can get all these packaging material from USPS for free. You just need to go down and get it.
So do take advantage of that. And do take advantage of the ability to just check it and then add it to your store. So below the packaging section is the shipping label section. Shopify works really hard, I know, to get discounted shipping. And they also have some discounts for getting all the labels and the material that you may need in setting up and doing your shipping within your operation. If you have shipping going already and you know where to get printers and all that stuff, great. You can get all that equipment. If you're totally new to the shipping game and you don't know where to get started, they do have a Shopify hardware store here that has just about everything.
From the printers themselves to rolls of labels, you can get all that stuff to get started right through that link and be off to the races with your shipping. Below the shipping label section is packing slips. This is an overlooked opportunity for branding and customization. So every time you send out a packing slip, you can, you know, put it in with your product and before you ship it off, there's an opportunity there.
And I think anytime that you can brand or further tweak the branding of your business online, you should take advantage of it. So let's take a quick look in here. So if I click edit, it's gonna pull this up. It's a ton of code, incredibly intimidating. But don't stop there. Just to the right over here, there is a link that Shopify provides on how to make common edits. There are some very simple edits that you can make even if you're not familiar with doing code. Like just changing the name on your packing slip and instead putting your logo. Definitely something that you should strive for in making your operation just a little bit more better.
Below packing slips is a section called carrier account. This is another kind of unique setup. Where if you already have an account with USPS or UPS, you can connect that account together so that the rates that you've already negotiated show up for your Shopify store. There is something though, that I wanna point out in this carrier account. So let's go ahead and click more. As you're going through that process, you may be blocked and it may tell you here you need to have an advanced Shopify or Shopify plus plan in order to take advantage of the carrier calculated shipping rates. But if you go just a little bit further, you'll see, if you're on the Shopify plan or the Shopify basic plan, which is the entry one, you can still access this if you move off the monthly billing to the annual billing. So if you make that switch and pay for your Shopify bill annually, you'll have access to carrier calculated shipping rates.
There's one more step, though, that you need to take. When you make that annual payment, they don't automatically reach out to you and let you know that you now have access to this. You'll need to reach out via support and let them know, hey, I've paid annual, I would like access to the carrier calculated shipping rates. So definitely something if you've already negotiated, you wanna take advantage of that for consistency for your shipping rates. And finally, this bottom section here is the custom order fulfillment.
Order fulfillment and linking that with somebody who's doing your orders, is if you had a warehouse, maybe it's overseas, if you're in the US, maybe you have a warehouse in Europe or visa versa, you could even have a warehouse down the street, if that's who's handling the fulfillment or the shipping and sending of all of your products and merchandise. So most established fulfillment centers have the appropriate software in order to link. So any orders that are taking place on your Shopify store, you can sync that with your fulfillment center at different levels in maybe email, in maybe live.
It just depends. But you have that syncing so you don't have to take your orders and manually transfer them over to the fulfillment center. So if you wanted to add fulfillment with a center, you can do that there. So let's go back up to the top. And we are. I wanna spend some time in the manage rates and create new profile. All right, let's take a look at manage rates. Now before I click on this, I wanna point out that in this section here I have no shipping rates. It's possible if you're starting with a new store there may be some default rates in here. Probably called domestic and the rest of the world. Or maybe you've set up shipping rates before and you fiddle with them. Those will show in this section. I've deleted all of mine now so that we start from scracth and I can show you how to build out these rates from zero.
So let's go ahead and click on manage rates. And this section here is gonna show that this is the general profile. It's including these products. I only have one product created in this demo store. If you have hundreds, it may show hundreds of products in there. Below that it's shipping from. Make sure it's shipping from the right location when you set these rates up. So if you have multiple stores, they're gonna have different rates. So make sure that is selected. You can click manage here to select the appropriate store. If you only have one, it's going to default. Then below that we have shipping to no zones or rates. We need to create that. So let's go ahead and create shipping zone. When we click the create shipping zone button, it's gonna provide us with this list of every country in the world that you can possibly ship to.
And you can select them. And you can set those up as shipping zones to ship to. For this video, we're gonna stick with just the domestic and we'll look at one international country. We're not gonna get too complex. So let's focus on the United States by itself. Now we could come here and create a zone name, called United States. But let's take a closer look at what's included with the United States first. So if I go ahead and I search here under United States, I'll see that that zone pulls up.
Now if I select that, on the right here you'll notice it's selecting 62 of 62 states. I wanna take a closer look at that, because I don't know about you, pretty sure there's only 50 states, so what are they talking about? So let's hit that dropdown and you'll see immediately the third one down is American Samoa. So they're including other districts and territories that are included with the United States. That's where they're getting that. They have Washington DC, that's a district of Colombia.
That's not a state, so that's included in there. Micronesia. And if you go all the way to the bottom, you'll also see that they include shipping to the Armed Forces. So if you wanted to ship only within the United States but also include those in the Armed Forces, no matter where they are in the world, you can have these options checked. That will cover you for the Americans, Europe and Pacific. But let's say we wanna set this up where we wanna separate out just the continental United States, the contiguous 48 states. And we wanna split out Alaska and Hawaii. Everything else for now, let's put on this side, just so I can show you how we can create some different zones. So let's call this first zone, United States 48. Okay. So I'm gonna go ahead and deselect everything that's not-- Excuse me, I'm gonna go ahead and deselect everything that's not included in the 48 states. So there it is. I've deselected all the other states and outliers that are not part of the 48 contiguous states and I have 48 of the 62 states. So I'm gonna go ahead and click done. And I now have a section in here, a shipping zone that's United States 48. I know what my rates are when I ship within those 48 states so I wanna go ahead and add the rate for that shipping zone. So right below that, click that button that says, add rate. So we can do a couple of different things when we're adding the rate.
We can set up our own rates. Why would you wanna do that? Maybe if you only have a few products, or maybe even one. A lot of Shopify stores only sell one product and you know exactly what your rate is going to be, you can go in and set up your rates yourself if you want to. If you don't, you can use the carrier calculated rates. When you select on that it gives you the ability to hit this drop down and you can pick the ones that are already connected with Shopify. A lot of people work with USPS, so let's go ahead and click on the USPS shipping carrier rates. So when that pulls up, that's gonna give you a bunch of different services that are provided via USPS. You can pick the ones that you use, or that you want to make available within your store and that people can select when they're making a purchase. Future services, I don't work too much with that. I recommend you not check it off unless you're particularly keen on having that function available. Below that is the handling fee. The handling fee is a great way to include this cost of packaging. The box, the bubble wrap, the foam that you're putting in there, the wrapping. All of these incidentals that are included when you send the product out.
Now you can create this handling fee in a couple of different ways. You can do it as a percentage of the cost of the item itself, or you could do a flat amount. So if I were to put in five dollars and click done. Let's say we do first class mail and we do priority mail and I click done there. We've now created a rate that's set up for shipping to the United States 48. Now let's say we wanna create a rate on our own and we wanna offer free shipping when someone purchases a certain amount of product from our store, we no longer want to charge them shipping. So we can come in and we can add a rate here. And we're gonna stick with the set your own rates, okay.
And we're gonna pick our shipping speed. Let's say we're gonna offer the free shipping only on the economy, five to eight business days. That we're gonna set up there. And yeah, we want the price to be free but we wanna create some conditions in order to give the free shipping. So go ahead and click add conditions. And we're gonna do this by order price. So we're gonna say, if anyone orders a $100 or more, no maximum price, and let's do this. 99,99 and up, they're going to get free shipping. Now if you don't put the price in here it will automatically default to free. So when I click done, we now have a new shipping rate in here under your rates that says, economy speed, the condition is 99 and up. Five to eight business days and the pricing is free. So somebody will see that price of free when they are ordering and their order value goes above $99,99. So that's how we can set up some basic rates for that shipping zone.
Let's go back to the shipping zone and let's say, yeah, I wanna set up additional rates. Separate for the state of Hawaii and Alaska because I know the shipping is more expensive. So let's go ahead and create another shipping zone. And we're gonna call this zone, let's call this Hawaii and Alaska. And we're going to search within the United States again. And we'll hit our drop down menu and we're gonna see that all of these other locations within the United States are grayed out and we can't select them. Because they're already in another zone. So, that's why I recommend when you set that up, instead of just picking all domestic at one time, go ahead and select specifically where in the United States you want your shipping pricing and the rates set up for. So that you can come back in and now go to these other locations and set up specific pricing for them. If your pricing is the same for all 62 locations in there, sure, you can select United States as one time. So let's go ahead and we are going to just do Alaska and Hawaii. So let's select Alaska and we'll deselect everything else. There's Hawaii, we'll leave that one selected. And there you are. You'll see now we'll only have two of the 62 states selected. So let's go ahead and click done. And you'll notice below this shipping zone, United States 48, we now have another zone that's called Hawaii and Alaska. These rates that we created here, right, are custom rate for free shipping and our carrier and app rates are attached with this zone. This gives us the flexibility to create separate rates for this new zone of Hawaii and Alaska. So let's go ahead and do that and let's set up our own rates again.
And let's do our free shipping first and let's say instead of a $100, we're gonna need a $150 order in order for it to make sense to give free shipping to Hawaii and Alaska. So we'll do it on order price again. We'll put 149,99 and no limit on the top. We click done. There we have our first item set up here. Free shipping, anything 149,99 and up. Let's go ahead and add another rate. Let's add our carrier rate and let's say that we ship DHL when we go. We don't use USPS, so we'll leave DHL in there. And because it's going to Hawaii and Alaska, maybe our product is a little bit more fragile or we're worried about things and we're gonna package it a little bit differently. So instead of a five dollar flat amount, let's say we add seven dollars to every product. That's all gonna change and be variable depending on what you're setting up for, your particular packaging. But it's just nice to know that you can set up these zones within the United States. And break them out if you need to. You can lump them together and then each one will have its own separate rates.
That's some of the flexibility you can get in the Shopify shipping. Now let's set up an international one. We're not gonna get too heavy into international. But let's just say we wanna do Canada. Now that we've done two in the United States, it's almost identical. So let's go ahead and create a new shipping zone and this one we're gonna call Canada. We're gonna search for them here. And there's Canada. Similar to the United States, they have provinces and there's 13. So again, if you wanted to break that out because you know shipping to one province would be more expensive, or even less expensive, you can do that. For this video, we're gonna select all of Canada and all 13 provinces. Go ahead and click done. And there we are, we have another shipping zone now added. Let's go ahead and add some carrier calculated rates in there. Let's go ahead with DHL as well. Now this one is gonna pull up the option for clicking world-wide. Let's go ahead and give a handling fee. Let's say that that's seven dollars as well. We'll click done. And we now have another shipping zone set up within Shopify. Let's go ahead and click save. You can create almost as many shipping zones as you want. So you can get as specific as you want in creating those shipping zones and once they're set up then it's automated. It'll do it automatically on checkout. But there's one other thing that comes up with shipping that I wanna show you. Let's go back to the main shipping section here. And this is what happens is, okay, I'm shipping T-shirts to Canada, that's one cost. I ship T-shirts to Hawaii and Alaska, that's a separate cost.
I have all those rates set up. I'm shipping to the United States 48 and you got all those rates set up. But let's say you had one product that was a large glass sculpture and it's an unusual outlier of product. Maybe it's a line of products, maybe you have something that's very fragile and you don't wanna lump it in with all those zones. In fact, you wanna tie the rates to the actual product itself. We can do that right below manage rates. We can come down here and create a new profile. So let's click on that and let's take a look at creating a new profile. Now it's already suggesting we do fragile products, so let's stick with that and let's just create a profile called Fragile Products. Here it's going to ask you below that, what are the products you want as a part of this profile. Now I only have a T-shirt loaded in here for the demo. But let's say it's our extra large T-shirts. So I'm gonna select those. I'll click done. So now Shopify knows that hey, when these three products are shipped, they're part of a new profile. So now we wanna go ahead and let's go ahead and click save. That's gonna take us back to the main menu and you'll see here we have a fragile product section in here. Now we can go back into manage rates, just like we did with the other items and we can create special rates and special handling fees for these particular products. So let's go ahead and create again a shipping zone.
Let's say that we can ship this to the entire United States, just to keep it simple. We're gonna label this United States and let's look for United States. And we're gonna include all 62. Of course you can do like the other one and just do it 48. And we'll put that in there. So now we have a zone that we'll ship these particular products too. Let's go ahead and add a rate. We're going to use the carrier rates. Let's go USPS. And because this is glass products, we're gonna go ahead and double our handling fee, just because of the additional product. And let's go ahead with $10. I think we had set it at five. This one, we're gonna change this as well because maybe we only want this to go priority mail express and priority mail. Just because of the special handling, so we'll block off these other options so people can't see them. Here we go, we'll click done. And now, under this shipping profile, we have those rates set up. We can click save. We'll go back to our shipping and delivery view here. And we can see everything that we've set up within the store.
We've set up rates for Canada, Hawaii and Alaska and the United States 48. All separate, different rates, different handling fees, depending on where we're shipping these items to. We've also set up a special profile for three unique products that we have that we know we want to have them shipped a little differently. Additional handling fee. And if you're setting up your own rates in there, you can even have higher rates.
Guys, once you have that set up and once you've tinkered in here and set rates up, set profiles up, you're gonna feel comfortable setting up any type of product that you load into your store. I hope this video helped you with the shipping and delivery within Shopify. Don't be too intimidated. Jump in, give it a try.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video.
