I am about to start a store selling products in New Zealand. I’ve got no idea of the best way to
calculate shipping costs based on location (there doesn’t seem to be anything for NZ postal services, just American and Canadian) - Should I just go a flat rate for rural and a flat rate for urban?
Have an easy process to print the shipping label - again, there doesn’t seem to be an option for NZ-based courier companies (NZ Post, NZ Couriers, Fastway etc.).
If anyone has any experience doing a similar thing in the NZ market, I would love to hear your processes.
Shipping can be a complex and difficult choice to make, but don’t worry, Shopify has some apps that can help you with this, should you need them.
There is also the option to do as you said in option 1, to set up a flat rate for rural and urban. You can set up your shipping rates in settings > shipping > manage rates > add rates and choose which rates or countries you want to ship to.
In there you can create price-based and weight-based rates, as well as free shipping rates and more!
Then there are the third party app choices that New Zealand based Merchants use, two of which I will share with you below.
You can use ShipperHQ’s Landed Cost Engine to show cross-border duties and taxes directly at checkout, so your buyers always know exactly what they are paying, and you don’t have to worry about calculating the extra fees yourself.
Use Zones in ShipperHQ to establish different shipping areas, and from there set rules to charge or surcharge a certain amount for shipping per zone.
Plus, we integrate with several cross-border carriers like Zenda and Easyship that will handle the customs work for you and make international shipping easy.
Get in touch with our sales team, and they would be happy to discuss further. Or you can sign up for a free 30-day trial and see how ShipperHQ works for you.
Although I do not have any experience doing a similar thing in the NZ market I think you can use the Ready ToShip Labels & Tracking app. This app has some highlight features below:
Reduce the manual work in importing orders from Shopify
Show live shipping rates for your customers
Automatically validate and fix customer addresses
Require only on click to print shipping labels
Send tracking data to your Shopify with ease
Besides this app, you could also try other apps such as: ShipRobot, Ship&co, … You can get these apps here.
We sell within NZ and use NZ Couriers as our courier. They have a Shopify app (Gosweetspot) which manages the shipments including printing the labels. It works very well and is free. We had Fastways before but had to do it with the ShipIt app which was $50/month and was not as good. The other couriers may also have their own apps.
The shipping rates can be set by NZ regions (16 in total). The problem with Shopify is that you can’t set a rural charge to apply automatically as it cannot tell if an address is rural or not. Some apps can do that but are generally not worth the extra cost. You have to offer the rural surcharge at check out. Some customers are honest and click the rural price and other don’t.
I have the same issue which arose yesterday- spoke with support chat who
said they were working on it. As a stopgap, I have removed the regions and
put more shipping options, so that at checkout the buyer is offered 4
options to choose from North I, North I Rural, South I, South I Rural. I
removed Hawkes Bay as a separate region for now.
I have not made progress on this beyond offering the buyer the option
between normal and rural deliveries, and hope he is honest. Some are and
some are not. We monitor our overall freight cost against what we charge
customers and it is more or less balanced because we make a profit on same
deliveries, particularly on small orders which offset losses on other
shipments. The other problem is that our couriers NZ Couriers charge based
on the size of the box whereas Shopify has a weight based charge.
@David_Moore when you say “add rural option and hope customer is honest”, are you talking about adding more shipping rates, or something else? I don’t see any “rural option” in the options.
We currently have one zone and six different rates based on package size – is there any better option than creating another 6 rates for Rural delivery of that same package size?
The “create shipping zone” seems error-prone as then you have to manually add products to the zone and it might be easy to miss some out, or add non-shipped products by accident . (And we would have to add the six rates to the new zone anyway).
The regional based shipping options in the Shopify shipping module are too broad to satisfy the variations in shipping costs across New Zealand. While I have been able to configure Shopify shipping rates for most NZ Courier deliveries, and have successfully integrated with GoSweetSpot, our oversize shipments >80Kg are challenging and we have decided to zero rate these products and advise the customer at checkout that shipping cost are to be confirmed. This works to a point, except that if the order combines shipping rates then the customer doesn’t see the TBC note for the oversized item (I hope this makes sense!). Rural Delivery is another layer of complexity to be addressed
I believe a postcode based app is likely the answer but have yet to muster the energy to install and trial.
The GoSweetSport <=> Shopify integration app is installed from GoSweetSpot, not Shopify.
In GSS, go to Administration=>Integration menu and select Shopify. This will take you to a config menu and, once you enter your Shopify store address, GSS will be enabled on your store and the App will appear in the Shopify Apps list.
The interface is not the problem - the shipping details go to Gosweetspot
which prints out the ticket. The problem is that you have already charged
the customer for shipping so if it turns out to be rural you are out of
pocket.
