It is not uncommon to sell internationally. The problem arises when you need to handle shipping to different countries. For example, your store is located in the US. Your customers are in the US, the UK, Australia and Vietnam. You want to setup the shipping fee as following:
- For customers in the US, the shipping cost would be flat $5
- For customers in the UK, the shipping cost would be flat $15
- For customers in Australia, the shipping cost would be flat $10
- For customers in Vietnam, the shipping cost would be flat $8
Let’s learn how to setup your shipping method to achieve the structure above.
How To Setup Different WooCommerce Shipping Rates By Country
Here are the steps we are going to do:
- Add different shipping zones for each country
- Add flat rate shipping for each shipping zone
There are only two steps. It’s just simple like that.
Add different shipping zone for each country
Based on the shipping structure mentioned at the beginning of the post, we are going to need 4 shipping zones for each zone, we need a flat rate shipping fee. Let’s learn how to setup one shipping zone and fee. You can do exactly the same for other zones.
First, go to WooCommerce->Settings->Shipping and click on Add shipping zone:
Add flat rate shipping for each shipping zone
Next, click on Add shipping method:
select Flat rate and then click on Add shipping method.
Then we have something like this:
Next, we are going to setup flat rate fee for the zone. Let’s click on the Edit link below the Flat rate title:
As discussed above, the shipping rate for Australia is $10. You can set the method title to anything you like. Click on Save changes:
As you can see, the Save changes button is inactive. That means WooCommerce has saved the settings for us. If you see the button is active (text color is white), just click on it to save the settings.
Now, if you go to WooCommerce->Settings->Shipping, you’ll see the shipping zones you created:
Test the shipping cost for different countries
Now, let’s make a test purchase. I’m going to order some pairs of shoes on the store.
In this example, I ordered 10 pairs. Let’s go to cart:
You can see that the shipping rate is $8 and it’s the flat rate shipping for Vietnam. As I’m not logged in, WooCommerce determined the shipping method by my IP address (I’m living in Vietnam right now). You can also notice that WooCommerce told us that the cost is only an estimate. To know the exact shipping cost, let’s click on Calculate shipping and change my address to Australia:
After clicking on Update, you can see that the shipping fee is now $10, instead of $8. You can go ahead and change the address to an US or UK address, the shipping cost will update accordingly.
Conclusion
As you can see, WooCommerce provides us some flexibility when setting flat rate shipping for different countries. Using WooCommerce default settings, you can also set shipping fee per product if you like. If you need more advanced shipping fee structure, you may need to use a plugin to achieve that.