When you set up shipping options in your store, they get assigned to the All Destinations zone by default which means that customers from any location in the world can choose such shipping options and place an order.
To offer a shipping option to a certain area only, you can restrict that shipping option to that destination area. For this, you can define a zone on map (it’s usually used for a local delivery) or go advanced and select a region/country/states from the lists or even limit a zone by zip codes.
Use Zones on Maps
To create a zone on a map for delivery:
- In the side panel, click eCommerce and then click Manage Store.
- Click Shipping & Pickup and click the shipping method you want to create a zone for.
- Scroll to Delivery zone, select Zone on Map, and then click Create Zone.
- You will see a polygon on the map. Use the drag handles of the polygon to resize the zone you deliver to with this shipping or delivery method.
- Click Save and Finish.
If you’ve specified an address as your Shipping Origin in the Shipping & Pickup page, that address will be pinned on the map. Right-click on the created polygon to see how far you deliver in kilometers.
In case you have the same delivery rate for different locations, click +Add new zone on the map and use additional polygon to define another area for your shipping option. You can add up to 20 polygons per zone.
Use Countries, States, Zip Codes
To create a zone for a delivery method or a tax rate by using country, states and zip/postal codes:
- In the side panel, click eCommerce and then click Manage Store.
- Click Shipping & Pickup and click any shipping method, or click Settings, Taxes and click Manage Tax Rates.
- Click Manage Zones.
- Click Add New Zone.
- Click Add Country to restrict the zone to a specific country, select this country from the list and click Add countries to confirm your choice. Or click Add Region to quickly select all countries that belong to a certain region like North America, European Union or Africa.
- Click Add State to restrict the zone to a specific state in the country, select this state from the list and click Add States to confirm your choice. If you are going to ship to all states within the selected country, leave the State list empty.
- Fill out the Zip/Postal codes field to restrict the zone to certain locations within the state, for example cities, towns and streets.
You can use wildcard symbols to build the list of zip/postal codes:- “?” matches any single character
- “*” matches any number of characters, including zero. Spaces will be ignored.
- “_” matches any number of spaces (at least one)
- “^” excludes certain zip codes (e.g. ^432011 - only the zip code 432011 is excluded; ^432* - all zip codes that start with 432 are excluded)
- Click Save.
If you add states to the zone that already includes several different countries, you should add states for all these countries.
Repeat the above steps to create other zones if you offer different shipping rates for different countries, states, and so on.
When at checkout a customer enters an address that is within a zone, they see all your shipping options available for that zone and can choose how they want you to ship their order. Otherwise, if a customer’s address doesn’t fit any of your zones, they see the Sorry, we don't ship to this location message and can’t place any order in your store.
Change Delivery Zones for a Shipping Option
You may need to assign another zone to a shipping option or add/remove an area from a zone that you ship to.
To update a delivery zone for a shipping option:
- In the side panel, click eCommerce and then click Manage Store.
- Click Shipping & Pickup and click on the shipping method you need to change a zone for.
- Scroll to Delivery zone.
- Depending on how you’ve set up the zone:
If you use delivery radius, under Zone on map click Edit Zone and shape the polygon as necessary using drag handles. To remove some addresses from the delivery, instead of a single common zone you can add several zones in the desired places on the map.
If you use country/states/zip codes to form a zone, under Advanced settings select another zone from the drop-down or click Create new zone if you don’t have the zone you need in your store yet and then choose the newly created zone from the drop-down.
To update the zone itself, for example add or remove an area from it, click Manage zone, click on the zone name on the leftand make the necessary adjustments. Note that the changes will apply globally, that is if you have other shipping options assigned to this zone, your zone updates will apply to those shipping options, too.
Set Up Destination Zones for the UK
Since there is no standard and finalized list of the UK counties that should be used in online stores, it is advisable to calculate a shipping rate for the UK based only on a Country name and a Postal code.
At checkout when the UK is selected as a “Ship to” country, the State (County) is displayed as a text field, not a drop-down list that requires selection. Customers have to input their county name to the State (County) field. If you calculate shipping rates based on County and your customer mistypes at checkout, they will see a warning that there is no shipping to this location till they enter the county name correctly.
To minimize the negative effect of such mistypes at checkout, we recommend you to leave the list of States(Counties) in the UK Zone settings empty and use the postal codes for restricting the delivery zones.
If you need to offer different rates for different areas in the UK, you can restrict the zones by postal codes, so that the shipping rate applies to the addresses that are covered by these postal codes.