Shipping zones

A shipping zone groups the places you ship to, so you can treat different regions differently. Zones are the where half of CIQRA’s shipping engine — they decide which set of delivery options and prices a shopper is offered based on their destination.

Conceptual overview, and here is the honest reason

The admin does have Shipping carriers and Shipping rates screens under Settings. This page still explains the model rather than walking through those screens, because the steps have not been checked against them as they are today. The limit is this documentation, not the product.

Why group destinations

You rarely want to charge the world the same shipping price. Delivering across town costs less than delivering across a continent, and some places you may not ship to at all. A zone lets you carve up your destinations by region — say a domestic zone, a neighbouring-countries zone, and a rest-of-world zone — and then attach different rules to each.

Each order’s destination is matched to a zone, and the shopper is offered the delivery options that belong to that zone.

How zones decide what a shopper sees

At checkout the engine finds the zone that covers the shopper’s destination and draws the delivery options from it. Two consequences follow:

• If no zone covers a shopper’s location, there’s nothing to match — so they see no delivery options.
• A destination should be covered clearly, so an order lands in the zone you intend and gets the rates you meant for it.

That makes zones the foundation: rates and methods only ever appear through the zone they’re attached to.

Zones and rates go together

A zone on its own doesn’t quote a price — it needs methods and rates attached to it to actually offer delivery. A zone with no rate is effectively invisible to shoppers, the same as having no zone for that destination. Adding those prices is covered in Shipping rates and methods.

Tip

When a shopper in a particular country reports “no delivery options”, the usual cause is that no zone covers their destination — or the zone that does has no rate. See Shipping isn’t calculating at checkout.