WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping with Table Rate Shipping Plugin

With this article, we’ll explain how to set up WooCommerce weight-based shipping using the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro

This guide should help you achieve any shipping condition that requires weight as a rate calculation parameter.

What is WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping?

WooCommerce weight-based shipping is the ideal and preferred way to calculate the shipping costs of a physical product. It makes even more sense if you have multiple products that vary significantly by weight. 

Let’s say you sell all kinds of clothing items like shoes, jackets, and dresses. One single flat rate won’t be ideal here since all items have different weights. 

You can say for sure that there will be a significant weight & price difference in shipping a pair of shoes compared to a light summer dress. So clearly, charging different shipping rates based on weight slabs is more fitting in such scenarios.

To calculate accurate shipping costs, you need to measure products based on their weight, dimensions, and other factors that may affect the final cost. And beyond a defined range, you can define the shipping rate per weight unit. 


How does the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro help calculate shipping costs based on weight?

Most new business owners and merchants struggle to set up WooCommerce weight-based shipping. That’s because WooCommerce, by default, doesn’t provide enough options to set up rates based on weight. And even if you manage to do so, you would have to test and ensure the shipping cost calculation is working as expected. 

The WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro can be easily configured to set up accurate WooCommerce weight-based shipping rates. Let’s go one by one and see how this plugin makes rate calculation so simple. 


WooCommerce shipping rates based on weight

woocommerce weight based shipping

As shown above, you would find the necessary weight-based shipping options such as min weight, max weight, base costs, etc., in the plugin settings. Here you can set up the shipping rules based on your business needs and requirements. 

After setting multiple rows as per your shipping need, a popup note in the last column will help you with the text translation of the business rule. You can use these little tooltips whenever you need help.

Read this article to learn how to set up weight-based shipping on your WooCommerce. 


Removing the Unused Shipping Columns

Not all the columns in the Rate Matrix are used by all businesses. Let’s take a case where you don’t need the following columns for your business.

  • Method Title: As you don’t have a different shipping method title.
  • Cost/weight: Only fixed cost. no weight per kg cost.
  • Weight round: No weight rounding. shipping cost calculated for the exact weight.

You can hide the above-listed columns and use only the columns which are important for your business.

woocommerce weight based shipping options

As you see all the columns will be selected by default and you can choose to remove the columns as your business need. Now let’s see how the rate matrix looks after removing the columns.

rate matrix

It is convenient to display only the needed columns for business. And did you notice that the Display/Hide matrix columns have selected only 4 columns now? You can select the remaining columns whenever your business demands them.


Excited to see what more features are in stock. 

WooCommerce International Shipping using the Rest of the world & Any Country selection

The WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro is the perfect shipping plugin to set up shipping rates if you’re shipping outside of your country. You have so many parameters like zip codes, city, state, and country, that allow you to do that. 

After setting up WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro for selected countries, you would like to set up a single rate for the rest of the world.

Don’t start sweating thinking about setting up shipping rules for 100+ countries! Nothing to worry about, there is an easier way!

country based woocommerce shipping

Similarly to set up shipping cost for all countries “Any Country” selection will be useful.

set up shipping cost for all countries

WooCommerce Free shipping based on weight

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin can also be used to provide the WooCommerce Free shipping method. In order to understand how this works, let’s introduce free slower shipping if the order is above 10kg.

woocommerce free shipping based on weight

Let’s have a look at how free shipping appears in the checkout.

woocommerce cart page with free shipping

Reusing the same WooCommerce shipping rule

There are times when you may have to copy the same shipping rule, again and again, to set up new rules. This can happen when you wish you create multiple rules with different weight slabs. 

duplicate multiple shipping rules

In the screenshot above, you can see the option called Duplicate rule(s) that allows you to do that. This way you can easily set up hundreds of different shipping rules if you have a complex business requirement. 


How to save shipping costs by providing USPS Flat rate for lighter items and UPS for heavier items?

Store owners sometimes have to sell products that are heavier than other products and thus, have to pay a higher shipping cost. On the other hand, the shipping cost for lighter products is usually less.

However, one of the main reasons that the store owners cannot save that much on the shipping cost is due to the reason that they use a single shipping carrier for shipping all their products.

For example, USPS Shipping Rates are cheaper when it comes to shipping small products. However, as the product weight increases, the shipping rates are almost similar to that of UPS. UPS, on the other hand, provides much better shipping service as well as support for freight shipping.

Hence, the best way to save more on shipping will be to smartly choose the shipping carrier based on your product size. Let’s take a real-life example to understand this better. 

According to Samantha, a WooCommerce store owner, “We need specific shipping requirements. When a product is under 50 pounds, we want to calculate shipping via USPS. But when the product is over 50 pounds, we want to use a real-time UPS calculation. How would you go about setting this up?


Setting up weight-based shipping rules

The WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping plugin allows store owners to choose from the shipping carriers like UPS, FexEd, USPS, DHL, and Stamps. It also supports conditional shipping rules based on the product weight.

Based on Samantha’s above shipping scenario, she can easily set this up since she requires using USPS below 50 pounds and UPS above 50 pounds. The image below shows the shipping rule based on Samantha’s scenario.

Weight based shipping

It is clear from this image that, until the product weight is below 50 lbs, she will only get the USPS shipping rates and UPS shipping rates will be shown on the cart page only when the customer adds products weighing more than 50 lbs.


All WooCommerce Shipping options in one place!

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro is an advanced shipping solution that is also easy to set up as compared to the default settings provided by WooCommerce under the Shipping tab. You don’t have to set up anything under this tab as all the necessary shipping options are available in the plugin. 

So if you want to set up WooCommerce free shipping, flat rate shipping, international & domestic shipping, etc., you can easily do that here. 


Conclusion

We hope this article would have helped you set up WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping using the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro. Here are a few more shipping cases possible with this plugin:

  1. WooCommerce Per Product shipping
  2. Setting up WooCommerce Shipping rates by city
  3. WooCommerce shipping cost per quantity
  4. Calculating WooCommerce shipping rates based on shipping zones 
  5. Based on WooCommerce Shipping Classes
  6. WooCommerce shipping rates based on state and shipping classes

For more details on the plugin mentioned please visitWooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro Plugin. If you need any help then contact our customer support. Our support team will help you set up shipping on your WooCommerce store. 

Happy selling!