How to calculate and print shipping labels in New Zealand?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Main Issue:
New Zealand Shopify merchants need solutions for calculating shipping costs (distinguishing rural vs. urban areas) and printing shipping labels, as native Shopify features primarily support North American carriers.

Key Challenges:

  • Shopify cannot automatically detect rural addresses or apply rural surcharges
  • NZ Post and local couriers (NZ Couriers, Fastway) lack native integration
  • Rural pricing requires manual postcode management

Recommended Solutions:

For Label Printing:

  • GoSweetSpot (free app for NZ Couriers) - mentioned as working well but some users report it’s no longer available
  • Multi Carrier Shipping Label (PluginHive) - integrates with NZ Post for real-time rates and label printing
  • ShipStation/eShip - for purchasing shipping tickets

For Shipping Calculations:

  • Bespoke Shipping app ($15 USD/month) - most discussed solution
  • Allows zone-based pricing using postcode rules (North Island Urban/Rural, South Island Urban/Rural)
  • Requires manual setup with rural postcode spreadsheets

Community Support:
Multiple users (@benocray, @David_Moore) offer to share pre-formatted NZ postcode spreadsheets for Bespoke Shipping setup. The postcodes capture ~95% of rural areas but require ongoing updates as different couriers define “rural” differently.

Status: Ongoing discussion with users actively sharing resources and requesting postcode lists.

Summarized with AI on November 3. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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@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).