Shipping Prohibited Items in WooCommerce

How-to-Legally-Ship-Alcohol-Products-via-FedEx

WooCommerce  Multi-carrier plugin provides an easy solution for eCommerce shop-owners to display shipping methods of popular shipping carriers such as UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Stamps.com. This way your customers can choose their preferred carrier while checking out. However, prohibited items such as alcoholic beverages or flammable liquids may create a big headache, especially if you are shipping worldwide. USPS has a list of prohibited items that they do not allow to be shipped internationally. This creates a strange problem for shop owners if a customer selects USPS as a shipping method for a prohibited product during checkout.

Consider the following case:
George owns a shop that sells wine and mineral water. His customers are from every corner of the world. There is also a steady domestic demand for his products. For cheap delivery of shipments within the United States, he prefers USPS. For international shipments, he can’t use USPS services for Wine as alcoholic beverages come under “Prohibited International Items.”

He comes with a plan to allow multiple shipping service options for international customers and writes a small message in the footer of every product he ships as follows: “Shipping Note: This product cannot be shipped via USPS as it is considered a prohibited item. Please choose a shipping service other than USPS when adding this product.” In order to provide multiple shipping options to the customer, George uses the following Multi-Carrier plugin.
However, after some time, he notices that some of his international customers are still choosing the USPS shipping option as it appears to be the cheapest among all the other options. They are not noticing the warning message or ignore it.

Solution:
So George creates a few rules in the Multi-carrier Plugin’s settings page as shown below:

Shipping Class based rules

Prior to this, he categorized the product “Wine” under the “Restricted” shipping class at the product level.
Assigning shipping classes

Similarly, the other product, Mineral Water, is under “Un-restricted” as shown below:Assigning shipping class to products

This configuration easily resolves George’s dilemma with international shipping.
Notice the cart only displays the FedEx option when the restricted/prohibited item is present.
FedEx rates on the cart page

This makes it super easy! Doesn’t it?