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.
5

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.

6 Likes