Table Rate Shipping

Flat shipping rates work until you sell something heavy, bulky or ordered by the dozen. Then you lose money on some orders and scare off customers on others, because real transport costs rarely rise in a straight line with the product price.

Your carrier charges by tiers, your store should too

Anyone selling physical products of uneven size (furniture, building materials, tools, drinks, pet supplies) faces a problem: the carrier bills by weight, parcels or volume, while the store charges something else. Table Rate Shipping is a WooCommerce plugin that lets you build a table of rules so shipping cost is calculated by shipping class, total weight, total price, total quantity and total volume of the cart.

A sample order, rule by rule

Imagine a store selling dumbbells and light accessories. Setup goes like this:

• Step 1, create the zone: you use WooCommerce shipping zones and add the table rate method to each one.
• Step 2, write the rule: each row combines five limits: class, weight, price, quantity and volume. Classes accept one or several. Weight, price, quantity and volume can be a fixed value, a range (10-15 includes both ends) or left empty, and an empty field is ignored when matching.
• Step 3, set the cost: instead of a fixed figure, you can write a formula.
• Step 4, sort: you drag the rules to set their priority.

One important detail: for a rule to apply, all five limits must be met at once. If a rule asks for the heavy class and a weight range, and the cart fits the class but not the weight, it is not used. Check that there are no gaps between ranges, because a cart that fits no rule will not see that shipping method.

Formulas for costs that do not fit a single figure

The cost field accepts the four basic operations and the functions ceil, floor, sqrt and abs. Each dimension has variables: total (for example tw for weight), lower limit, upper limit and the increase over the rule's lower limit. With them you can express something like 2*ceil(twi)+2.5: a base amount plus a charge per additional kilo rounded up. There are also two control words: skip discards the current rule and stop ends the checking and discards the method.

The total price used in formulas includes tax. You can also calculate by volumetric or dimensional weight, useful when a package takes up a lot of space and weighs little.

When rules number in the thousands

Entering rates one by one stops being viable with many destinations. The plugin imports and exports CSV from two places: below the zones list and above the rates table. In the first case, zones are created with continent, country, state and postcode, and their methods are added with the rates. If the zone already exists, its details are updated and existing methods are replaced by those in the CSV. In the second case, only the rates for that zone are loaded (or all of them, if the CSV has no zone column). Codes follow a fixed format: AS for Asia, IN for India, IN:GJ for Gujarat.

What the customer sees and what you cannot ask of it

Checkout does not change: the customer sees the table rate methods whose rules match their cart, and methods with no matching rule simply do not appear.

The plugin calculates by class, weight, price, quantity and volume. There are no rules by length, width, height, area, date, hour, specific product, category or customer role: those features are listed as planned, not as available. If you need, for example, a different price on holidays or for wholesalers, this tool does not solve it on its own.

Questions before installing

Can I charge per additional kilo?

Yes, with the increase variables inside a formula, such as twi for weight.

What happens if two rules match the same cart?

The first one in the table order is applied and no further rules are checked.

Can I select several classes in one rule?

Yes, the class field accepts one or several.

Does it work for stores without WooCommerce?

No, it is a WooCommerce add-on and relies on its shipping zones and classes.