How to Set Up WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping for Free

Consumers buy online because of the large number of available choices and the convenience of getting products delivered to their doorstep. While product prices usually stay same for everyone, the shipping costs can vary depending on a lot of factors. This includes the total weight, quantity, shipping speed, shipping distance etc.

You can solve all your shipping charge calculation woes with the help of a WooCommerce table rate shipping plugin. In this tutorial, I will show you exactly how to do that.

Installing a Table Rate Shipping Plugin

A table rate shipping plugin allows you to define your own custom shipping rates for a variety of conditions. This means that once you have specified shipping rates for a variety of conditions such as the product weight or shipping distance etc., the plugin will automatically calculate the final shipping cost to present to consumers.

There are many free as well as paid WooCommerce table rate shipping plugins available for you to install. For example, WooCommerce has an official Table Rate Shipping plugin but it costs about $99 annually. You can also find a paid Table Rate Shipping plugin on CodeCanyon that you can purchase by paying a one time fee of $25. It gives you free lifetime updates.

You will usually get more features and better support with paid plugins but it is also possible to get the basic functionality for free by installing a plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. For our tutorial, I will be using the Custom Shipping Methods for WooCommerce plugin. You can navigate to Plugins > Add New and then write Table Rate Shipping in the search field to find the plugin.

I chose this plugin due to a decent feature set. Click the Install Now button to install the plugin and then the Activate button to activate it.

Setting Custom Shipping Method Options

Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings once you have installed and activated the plugin. You should now see a bunch of tabs at the top of the page. Click on the Custom Shipping Methods tab and you will see some options to control the behavior of the plugin globally.

Here are some of the settings that I have applied for the Custom Shipping Methods:

First, you have to make sure that the plugin is enabled by checking the Enable Plugin checkbox. This is important to make the custom shipping methods we define to be available in WooCommerce.

Next, provide an Admin Title which will show up in the drop down menu when adding shipping methods. This will help you identify the shipping method set up by this plugin.

Finally, you have to Enable the checkbox for Add to Zero Cost option in order to add some custom text besides the Shipping label on the checkout page when the total shipping cost is zero. I have used the following markup for this purpose:

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<span style="font-weight:bold;">Free Shipping!</span>

Setting Up a Home State Shipping Zone

Now that we have completed a basic setup of the Custom Shipping Method plugin. We can start defining some shipping zones. Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings and then click on the Shipping tab. You will see the option of adding shipping zones. There is no limit on the number of zones that you can add. Customers will only see the shipping methods that apply to them.

Shipping Zones allow us to define where a particular shipping method is available. When a customer provides an address for shopping the products, WooCommerce will detect their shipping zone and automatically provide a list of available shipping methods. Click the Add Shipping Zone button. Set the Zone Name to Home State and Zone Regions to Nevada, United States.

Now, click the Add Shipping Method button and select Free Shipping from the popup that appears. Click on the Add Shipping button in the popup and you should see the shipping method listed under Shipping Methods.

Click on the Edit button that comes up when you hover over the title Free Shipping. You will now see a new popup where you can enter the following details.

We change the title to Free Shipping (2 to 3 Days) because this title will be shown to users on the checkout page when they see available shipping methods and modifying it to shows the number of days makes it more informative. I have also set a minimum order amount of 20 before this method shows up. Finally, click on the Save Changes button.

Now click on the Add Shipping Button again to add another shipping method that will deliver products faster but at a cost. Select Table Rate Shipping this time. You should see Custom Shipping added to shipping methods as shown below.

Click on the Edit button under Custom Shipping and you will see the following popup. I have updated the Method Title to Express Delivery (One Day). This will show up on the checkout page if the shipping method is available for users.

You can use the Cost input field to determine how the shipping cost is calculated. The plugin gives you to option to use a bunch of variables to calculate the final shipping cost. Here are the available variables in the free version.

We will keep keep things simple here and set the value of cost to 5 + [qty] which means that the total shipping cost would be five plus the number of items in cart.

Scroll down a bit and you will see a section for setting Availability conditions for the shipping method. Set a Min Cart Cost value of 10 so that this shipping method only appears if the total cost of items in the cart is at least 10.

As you can see, there are a lot of other criteria available for you to specify when our shipping method should be available. The value of all of them is set to 0 by default. This tells the shipping plugin to ignore that specific criteria. Click on the Save Changes button to update the shipping method.

I tested these settings on my local website with shipping address to set a city in Nevada, United States and the image below shows the result. The free shipping method only shows up when the cart value is above or equal to $20.

Setting Up a Home Country Shipping Zone

As I mentioned earlier, we can set up unlimited number of shipping zones to address all our shipping needs. Lets add another shipping zone that is used to set the shipping methods for shipping anywhere within the country.

Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings and then click on the Shipping tab. Click on the Add Shipping Method button to add a new shipping method.

Now select Table Rate Shipping in the next popup and then again click on the Add Shipping Method button. We will update the Method Title to Emoji Hoodie. This time we will set the cost to 0. However, there is a twist.

I want a particular hoodie to always have free shipping. To do this, I will enter the hoodie ID in the Required Products field. Under the Require Type field, we will set the value from the dropdown to Only the required products have to be in cart. Finally, click the Save Changes button.

Now, our Emoji Hoodie shipping method will be available across United States with no shipping charges as shown below. This is applicable only if the cart contains no other products.

We can similarly add other shipping method to our Home Country shipping zone.

Final Thoughts

Calculating shipping cost can be a complicated process due to the involvement of a variety of factors such as the distance, weight or the number of items to be shipped. However, using the right plugin can make the whole thing a lot easier. While there are some paid plugins available to do this in WordPress, we accomplished this with a free plugin. You can also consider using a paid plugin such as the one available on CodeCanyon if you want more features.