Shipping zones are specific geographical areas to which you can ship your products. These zones allow you to set shipping rates and delivery options based on the destination and create different shipping rates and options for different zones.
These Shipping Zones should be created within Shopify and the Swap Dashboard for Swap Global.
Defining Shipping Zones
Each shipping zone contains a country or set of countries or regions to which you want to apply the same shipping rates and options. Setting up shipping zones primarily aims to streamline the shipping process. By grouping locations with the same shipping costs and rules, you can provide accurate information to your customers.
Shopify shipping zones are related to Shopify Markets. To use Shopify shipping zones, the countries or regions included in your shipping zones must also be part of an active Shopify market. If not, customers from these countries cannot complete the check-out.
📖 To learn more about Shopify Markets, please refer to this article.
How to Set Up and Expand Shipping Zones
📖 Please refer to this article for information on creating and editing Shipping Zones.
Swap Shipping Zones
This section will explain how Shipping Zones in Swap work.
Details Section
The details section currently just consists of an input for the zone name. The name is the internal name used to reference this zone. It is displayed only to you.
Countries Section
The countries section is where you select which countries this zone should include. Any countries already in another zone will be disabled in the dropdown.
Buffers Section
In the buffers section, you can add an optional buffer to the amount charged to customers for duties and taxes. You can increase or decrease the tax and duties charged by a fixed percentage.
- A decrease buffer allows you to partially or completely subsidize the cost of duties and taxes, resulting in a cleaner checkout experience.
- An increase buffer allows merchants to cover extra fees that may not be accounted for at checkout.
Custom Fees Section
The custom fees section allows you to create as many custom fees as you like, which will be charged to the customer at checkout.
All custom fees created will be displayed and can be edited or deleted, and new custom fees can easily be created.
Clicking on a custom fee or the Add New Custom Fee button will open the custom fees form. All custom fees must have a name, which will be displayed on the order details page. The fee can either be a fixed amount or a percentage of the order subtotal.
⚠️ If VAT-inclusive pricing is enabled, the order subtotal used to calculate the fees will be the sum of the pre-VAT product prices, not the subtotal displayed on Shopify that includes VAT.
More information about custom fees can be found here.
Rules Section
The rules section allows you to create complex rules determining the shipping options displayed to customers.
A zone can contain as many rules as needed. The passing rule with the highest priority will display shipping options to the customer.
Clicking on a rule or the Add New Rule button will open the rule modal.
All rules require a name. This name is just used internally on the dashboard and is only displayed to you to reference the rule.
The rule interface is split into two sections: Conditions and Shipping Rates.
Conditions
This section determines which conditions must pass for this rule to be active. You can add conditions for either cart weight or cart subtotal.
Clicking the Add Condition button will show a dropdown menu for these two cart variables.
As many conditions as needed can be added to each rule. Conditions on the same variable will be joined with an OR. Groups of conditions on different variables will be joined with an AND. For this rule to be active, at least one condition line must pass for each cart variable.
Each condition line has three inputs:
- The Comparison Operator: Greater than or equal to, greater than, less than or equal to, less than, and between.
- The value to compare against.
- The unit for the value: Currency or weight units depending on the condition variable.
In the example above, this rule will be active if the cart subtotal is greater than or equal to 100 GBP and the cart weight is less than 10 kg.
Shipping Rates
If a rule’s conditions pass, the customer will see all of the shipping options in this section.
Shipping Section
The display name is the name for the shipping option displayed to the customer.
If you have local currencies active on your Shopify store, then Shopify will convert these rate amounts to the customer’s currency before displaying them.
Rule Priority
To prevent unknown results when conditions for multiple rules pass, you must order the rules by priority. When shipping options are being determined for a zone, rules will be tested in priority order, and the first rule with passing conditions will have its shipping options returned. Rule priority can be changed by pressing the reorder icon and dragging the rule to a new position.
The rule at the top of the list has the highest priority.
Form Validation
The Save button will be grey when the page is incomplete or invalid and will turn green when the form is properly filled out. Clicking on the Save button when grey will display a message detailing what needs to be fixed. When the page is successfully created/updated, you will be redirected to the shipping page, and a success notification will be displayed.