Regional Support: Shipping (UK)

[Victor]

Learn more about handling shipping and fulfilment while running your Shopify store in the UK.

This thread is part of the Regional Support threads offered for merchants in the United Kingdom. To see which other topics are available, you can visit the UK hub here.

Merchants based in the United Kingdom can offer both manual and third-party carrier calculated shipping rates to their customers at checkout. This second option allows UK merchants to link their FedEx and UPS accounts to Shopify and offer live rates from these providers at checkout.

Please note that the live rates can only be enabled if the merchant has the carrier calculated shipping feature enabled, which is a standard feature of our Advanced and Plus plans. However, this feature can also be added to a merchant's store for an additional cost of $20 USD per month if they are on the Shopify plan. Merchants on the Shopify plan can instead have this feature enabled at no additional cost if their subscrition is paid for on an annual basis. If you’d like to add this feature to your account, please contact our support team.

Outside of the integrated options of FedEx and UPS, there are a number of third-party applications that allow UK merchants to offer live rates from other shipping providers. Some apps will also allow you to buy shipping labels for different providers in the UK. These include:

• Royal Mail Shipping Extension (includes live rates from Royal Mail that appear at checkout).
• Starshipit Shipping & Tracking (includes live rates from the likes of DHL and DPD at checkout, as well as the ability to buy shipping labels from numerous carriers, including Royal Mail).
• Zenstores - UK Shipping App (includes the ability to buy shipping labels from numerous carriers, including DHL, DPD, Hermes, Royal Mail and Parcelforce).
• Multi Carrier Shipping Label (includes the ability to buy shipping labels from UK-based carriers including Royal Mail, Parcel Force & DHL)

Royal Mail also offer their Click & Drop app, which can be installed in the form of a sales channel in the Shopify admin. This app will allow you to easily buy and print Royal Mail shipping labels for your orders. You can refer to Royal Mail’s setup instructions to install the app in your store.

If you’re looking for more information or direct assistance with any of these apps, we recommend contacting the developers of the app directly. The developers build and support these apps and their contact information can be found on the app’s page on the Shopify App Store.

If you have a question or comment to make about shipping when based in the United Kingdom, please post it below.

[Daviddbx]

Can you not use the Royal Mail Click and Drop integration? It’s free and for what I do, it’s fantastic. Ive tried other shipping methods and found them unusable in comparison.
Splitting the UK up into regions? What shipping company does this? Most I’ve used are UK flat rate for mainland at least.

[Lucelly]

Hi David

I have tried Royal Mail but can’t get it to work at the mo.

Shopify said the app wasn’t supported when I installed it and it doesn’t show on my app list, however the click and drop comes up as a sales channel on collections and products.

Royal Mail says it’s integrated however when I test it, the checkout says no delivery options.

I’m at a loss. I’ve contact Shopify and Royal Mail.

I just find it utterly useless that a basic e-commerce system doesn’t have no the option for the UK 

[Daviddbx]

Persevere with Click and Drop. Once running it really couldn’t be simpler.
Have you created a click and drop account first?

[Lucelly]

Hi David,

Yes account set up and all of the weights etc in Royal Mail.

integration with Shopify set up.

When I test the checkout it just tells me this.

Like I said, my Shopify shop doesn’t show it as an app but it is there as a tick box in collections and in the product as a sales channel yet in the sales channel section of Shopify, the click and drop isn’t there.

Dont know how to sort it.

[Daviddbx]

That’s correct - it doesn’t show as an app.
In click and drop, go settings, integrations. Shopify should show there with a green link status symbol if connected.

[Lucelly]

Yes shows up in green as connected on my Royal Mail account, hence why I don’t know why it’s not working.

At a loss

[philosophyalice]

Hi Victor

I've just posted a question here 

https://community.shopify.com/c/Payments-Shipping-Fulfillment/Changing-the-text-translation-in-addre...

I think shopify could help UK and European customers more with address formats - the question above is about the address2 field which is set up to reflect the north American format.  I do think that UK / European customers are put off by this as I explain in the above question.  We have also recently been contacted by what.three.words who want us to encourage customers to put their what.three.words in the address2 field, and we're not doing that because we're worried it will make the problem even worse.  Many of our customers are new to online shopping and we are always trying to make things as clear and easy as possible, having American style address formats doesn't help this.

Is there any way shopify can make its address formats more generic?  

I just wanted to cross post this here as I am sure other UK shops will have the same issues.  Feel free to reply here or on the original post above.

Thanks for any help.

Alice

[Victor]

Hi @philosophyalice,

Thank you for reaching out with your question and for detailing the issues that you have. I see in the other thread you referenced another member suggested using your theme's language editor to make some changes, which is also what I'd recommend doing. Whilst this may not give you the exact results you want, it does allow for increased flexibility on what terms appear in the checkout fields, which in turn makes it easier for your customers to fill in their information correctly.

You may have done this already, but you can enable and disable some specific fields in Settings > Checkout:

These fields can be edited in the language editor, so you can change the wording to make them more appropriate for your needs. Please let me know if you need any further assistance with this.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[Lagruga]

@Victor (please can you provide an update on this?)

All Shopify has to do is to set up the same way as Canada, US and other countries with similar breakdowns.

UNITED KINGDOM
- ENGLAND
- NORTHERN IRELAND
- SCOTLAND
- HIGHLANDS
- ETC

I bet you guys that if Shopify do this, it will resolve 80% if not more of Sellers problems in the UK. Many of us use flat rates where the price changes based on the area - and that's pretty much it.

What's the problem? Tech? Coding? Politics? Not bothered? Why something so basic as this needs to take so long? Shopify have already done this for other countries so its unlikely to be an issue with coding or have to invest millions in order to deploy.

This is a PAIN for a lot of sellers, please resolve this.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

All Frustrated Customers

[Victor]

Hi @Lagruga,

I completely understand the frustration over this issue, and have seen numerous merchants in this thread and others express their dissatisfaction over the lack of updates on this. I know that this is a costly problem for merchants in the UK (and in the Republic of Ireland), and I have made sure to document all cases of merchant feedback on this issue for our development team to review. Whilst I cannot provide an update at this time, I can tell you that I have personally made an effort to reach out to others at Shopify to make them more aware of this request and the problems this causes for our British merchants.

As a member of our support team my influence in platform changes is limited, but I will continue to raise awareness of this issue as best as I can. Once I have an update to share I will do be sure to do so here in this thread.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care

[Outer_net_]

Just like the dimensional shipping debacle there is a problem and a solution.

The solution is - THERES AN APP FOR THAT 

The problem many smaller merchants cant afford the app add ons to make up for the shortcomings of an ecom platform such as this one that should come with this basic functionality.

If you are selling shoes or bags or sunglasses its all groovy you can just use default package size but what if we wanto send larger or smaller parcels then we can only over or under charge customers. 

People within the shopify community have been asking for feature additions like this for over a decade and people like Victor and others before Victor have been taking the feedback and putting it all somewhere and nothing has happened / nothing has changed! Only a lot more apps have come onto the scene.

With anything theres always a hidden cost and if you sell large volumes of single size items it is fine but for those of us that ship items of varying size to different regions what options do we have?

Shopify should be required by UK law in there EULA to make provisions for different territories - but the counter issue for doing this is happier merchants that will have greater number of options but less app revenue and there for less happy shareholders/founders. 

[Outer_net_]

When a country like the UK that has very high taxation and a strong online retail market then that is all it probably takes to justify limitIng [or not implementing] the functionality to then force people to pay for apps that put more £ back into the ecom platform. It is business and a very underhand way to do business.

[SidharthKumar]

Please Sir Return My Payment

[Amels]

Hi @Victor ,

I wondered if you could help me, I have bee searching for a while now and I can't find an answer.

I have 1 shipping profile and different weights in each of them as the price depends on the weight of the order. 

All my products have weights assigned to them for this reason. 

To give a basic example of my rates

0-100g is £1.30

101g-200g is £2.00

201g+ is £2.95

When I add an item to my basket that is over 201g it only gives the 0-100g price (£1.30) not the price for items weighing above 201g.

Please see screenshots:

Not sure what I am doing wrong.

Thank you

[Daviddbx]

Check its not in kg instead of grammes. My settings seem to switch between the two randomly.

[Amels]

@Daviddbx thanks just taken a look and It's in grams, I'm so confused as to why this doesn't work currently losing money 😞

[St3v3]

There's alot of people in this thread that are losing money, but Shopify just doesn't care and will not resolve it.

Good luck fixing your issues.

---

@Amels wrote:

@Daviddbx thanks just taken a look and It's in grams, I'm so confused as to why this doesn't work currently losing money 😞

---

[Amels]

@St3v3 I know been through tonnes of threads on other issues and still not resolved! but thank you hopefully it can get resolved!

[Lagruga]

On top of this issue, I have just noticed that tracking for Parcel Force isn't available (here goes another new topic!), there seems to be no native integration.

I mean, most, if not all main carriers should be available by now.

Shopify provides a service to the UK and Parcel Force not available?! Joke!

Cc: @Victor

[Victor]

Hi @Amels,

Thank you for reaching out and for providing those screenshots. This does seem like a strange issue, and I'd like to take a closer look at things to see if I can determine what is happening here. I'm going to send an email to you shortly so I can authenticate you on the store and try and replicate the issue whilst checking your shipping settings firsthand. Please look out for that and get back to me there.

Kind regards,

Victor | Shopify Social Care