Shipping
Introduction
Before you're able to accept orders for your physical products you'll need to decide which shipping methods you want to make available to customers. You can also allow customers to pickup their orders directly from your store.
Shipping Profiles
There are two types of shipping profiles.
- General shipping profile - This lets you add shipping rates for all of your products
- Product specific profiles - This lets you add shipping rates for some specific products.
You may want to use product specific profiles for fragile items, heavy items or otherwise products which cannot neatly fit into the shipping rates for your general profile.
In 90% of cases you'll be fine with using the general shipping profile, but the product specific profiles are a handy way to set a different shipping rate for specialised products.
Adding Shipping Rates
Firstly let's start off with adding shipping rates to the general shipping profile.
Please visit your "Settings" page and then click on the "Shipping" tab - you'll be taken to this page:
https://payhip.com/settings/shipping
Next click the "Edit" button listed next to the general shipping profile
Next you'll be asked to create a "Shipping Zone". What is this? It's the list all countries that you're looking to apply a specific shipping rate to.
Choose a name for this zone and then select all the countries you'd like to choose in the list.
Finally you're now able to add shipping rates to the zone you've just created.
You'll see the following options:
Let's discuss the different types of shipping rates you can setup:
- Flat rate - if you want a straightforward approach then setup a flat shipping rate which would charge a specific amount to customers for shipping regardless of the item weight or cart order price
- Item Weight - you may need to charge different rates of shipping to customers based on the weight of the item being purchased
- Order Price - in this case you can charge different rates of shipping to customers based on the cart total order price
If you click the "Advanced options" link you'll see the following
We recommend that you don't check the "Charge extra shipping fee for incremental quantities in cart" checkbox. Let's say for example you're selling t-shirts. Just because someone buys 3 t-shirts this doesn't mean that shipping will cost you 3 times as much since you can put all the t-shirts in the same package.
However for some sellers this feature might be handy for them. For example if you're selling a large item like a chair then shipping will likely cost you more for additional quantities of the item.
Shipping Rates On The Checkout Page
Below is an example of how shipping rates can be shown on your checkout page
Local Pickup
Shipping isn't the only option you can provide to your customers. You can also allow them to visit your store in-person to pickup their order.
The below video gives you an idea of the options available here
The first thing you'll need to do is to provide the address of your store which is available for local pickup.
Next you can define the expected pickup time and the instructions for the customer.
The expected pickup time is shown to customers before they complete checkout.
The instructions are shown to customers after they purchase and also in the email receipt that's sent to them after purchase. It's recommended to mention to customers how long their order will take to prepare here so that they can know when they should arrive at your store.
Local Pickup On The Checkout Page
Below is an example of how local pickup can be shown on your checkout page