Shipping Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Exclude Shipping Method From Specific User Role

WooCommerce offers a robust shipping system, but what if you want to tailor it based on the logged in user role?

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to exclude specific shipping methods from users with a particular role. This allows you to, for example, offer free shipping only to VIP members or restrict express delivery options to regular customers.

All you need is the user role slug (WordPress Dashboard > Users -> All Users > above the user list table you’ll see a horizontal list displaying the current user roles available on your site (e.g., Administrator, Editor, Author). Hover on one of them and see the URL, which will contain the exact slug e.g. “customer”) and the shipping rate ID you wish to disable (e.g. “flat_rate:9”. For more info you can find out how to find IDs here: https://businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-disable-free-shipping-if-cart-has-shipping-class).

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Populate Billing & Shipping When Adding A New User @ WP Dashboard

If you do a lot of manual work such as creating WordPress users for a B2B WooCommerce site (because they can only shop if they have an account, and you’ve disabled registration on the frontend), you may want to populate some Billing and Shipping fields so that you can save some time.

For example, imagine if all customers are based in Florida, USA; you could automatically populate their billing country, billing state, shipping country and shipping state!

So, let’s see how to approach this. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Shipping Rate Description @ Cart & Checkout Page

Each payment method on the WooCommerce Checkout page comes with a description right below the label. What if we could achieve something similar for the shipping rates, so that we can explain to the customer the difference between each method?

This question came up today in our private Slack channel for Woo developers, and we were able to write a quick snippet that does the trick. Here’s the complete code – enjoy!

WooCommerce: No Default Shipping @ Checkout Page

We already saw how to disable the default payment gateway in the WooCommerce Checkout page, so that users are forced to click on one of the options.

Well, we can do the exact same with the shipping methods!

In this way, customers will be forced to actually click on one of the shipping options. This is helpful when you don’t want to have a default shipping, and when your customers often “forget” to pick the correct one and ask to change it once the order has been placed.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Read-only Checkout Fields

Especially for B2B sites, it’s likely that customers are managed by the store admin and are not allowed to change their billing/shipping address unless they request to update it.

But even if you’re simply curious, there is a way to turn each checkout field into read-only inputs. In this way, the saved billing and shipping address will load, and the logged in customer won’t be able to change any data before checkout.

A little note: country and state are dropdowns, and this means adding the “readonly” attribute won’t stop you from changing the selected value. However, if we turn all fields to input type “text”, this problem will go away. And this is why you find two statements in the snippet below; first we turn the field into a text input, and then we make it read-only.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Split Cart Into Packages

There are a million plugins out there that allow you to make the most of WooCommerce “cart packages” – this is a short way to say that you have the chance to assign cart items to multiple “packages“, so that the customer can pick different shipping methods for each package.

For example, imagine you sell products that are only available for “pick up in store“, and others that are shippable. By splitting the cart into 2 packages, the customer can place both product types in the same cart, but will be able to choose “Local pickup” for package 1 only, while for package 2 they’ll select one of the available delivery rates.

Splitting the cart into multiple packages is as easy as looping through the cart items, and assigning them to its own package array based on shipping class. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Hyperlink to Shipping Method Label @ Cart & Checkout

Let’s say you want to help customers understand your shipping rates and benefits right on the WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages, by adding a link to each shipping option (e.g. “View shipping FAQ“).

As you can see from the first and second screenshot below, if you enter any HTML within the WooCommerce shipping zone -> shipping method settings, this will be stripped out, and HTML tags such as hyperlinks won’t work.

So, how can we add a clickable text link to each shipping method, given that we can’t use the WooCommerce settings? Well, as usual, a quick PHP snippet can help us with that. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Edit “Ship to a Different Address?” @ Checkout

The “Ship to a Different Address?” checkbox displays on the WooCommerce Checkout page and toggles the shipping form. That’s useful when Billing and Shipping addresses are different, so let’s say every B2C requires the double form.

However, the “Ship to a Different Address?” string may be confusing or may need further clarification, as not all customers are created equal. What about “I’d like to define a different shipping address” or “Ship to a different address than the Billing one“?

Either way, editing the string is super easy, so you can change it to whatever you like. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Hide “Shipping Via ___” @ Thank You Page, View Order Page

Especially when you do a lot of custom shipping, showing the shipping method title may not be a good idea. Honestly, the default “via ___” suffix beside the shipping cost doesn’t make much sense anyway.

So, let’s get rid of it. With a 1 liner. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Hide “Shipping to…” Address @ Cart

Even when the “shipping calculator” is disabled on the WooCommerce Cart page, a “Shipping to…” string will appear in the cart totals if an address has been previously entered or if geolocation is enabled.

Most WooCommerce store owners, however, wish to remove / hide this text, as it can be confusing for the customer. In this quick tutorial, we’ll study two different workarounds to achieve the same result. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add a New Country For Billing/Shipping

There are times when the WooCommerce countries database is simply not enough. While the WooCommerce team is usually very fast at updating its code (though, the newest country is apparently South Sudan, which became independent in 2011, the year WooCommerce launched!), you may need to DIY in certain cases.

Think of Northern Ireland for example. It’s not a “country”, however most Irish businesses would ship to Northern Ireland and not to “UK”, so having “Northern Ireland” in the Checkout page country dropdowns may help.

In this edge case study, we’ll basically take a look at how to add a custom country, how to make sure this custom country shows at checkout as a possible option (and in the shipping zones admin section), and also how to assign to it a custom list of states. You never know!

WooCommerce: How To Set Up Complex Shipping Rules

WooCommerce inbuilt shipping settings are quite simple – too simple, sometimes.

WooCommerce merchant often require a complex shipping setup, depending on the industry or the (very expensive) courier fees.

But shipping is much more: conditional logic, marketing, user experience.

Setting shipping costs with a handy “table rate” plugin, combining them with cart-based marketing actions and guiding your customers through the buying process can help you sell more and reduce your return rate.

Explaining to your customers why they can’t buy a certain product, or encouraging them to add another one to the cart to get a discount, or blocking certain shipping rates so that your courier doesn’t overcharge you… there are so many needs for a more advanced shipping setup.

In this article, we’ll tale a look at the importance of shipping costs, why conditional logic is a game changer and why customers love to get free shipping. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Set Up Order Delivery Slots

If you run an eCommerce store, one of the most crucial factors to provide a great customer experience and minimum cart abandonment is adding delivery order date and time slot options for your customers.

According to a UPS Survey, 12-28% of customers abandon their shopping carts because of the absence of estimated delivery dates before checking out. Your customers want to know when they can expect their orders or select a suitable date and time of order delivery per their convenience.

In fact, even eCommerce marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon display anticipated delivery dates and the calendar slots on checkout and product pages based on the customer’s location.

Hence, displaying delivery days and slots are essential features to ensure customer retention and sales – as they’re determining factors in customers’ purchasing decisions.

One of the most seamless ways to add the date and time slots before the checkout is through WooCommerce order delivery date plugins. But first, let’s see the different ways these plugins can benefit your online store, and your customers’ shopping experience

WooCommerce: Get All Shipping Zones & Rates

As an advanced WooCommerce developer, at some stage you’re really going to need this PHP function, the same way you often browse through Business Bloomer’s WooCommerce visual hook guides or the product / order / cart getters.

This time we go study how to “get” the shipping zones and rates, because it’s likely that you will need to loop through them when you need to display shipping rates somewhere, or for other custom functionalities. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Show Shipping Rates @ Single Product Page

Here’s a way to print shipping zones and rates on the single product page, so that users know how much they’ll end up spending once they reach the Cart/Checkout and there are no “hidden” fees. Not bad for some transparency = better sales conversion rate!

In this tutorial we will first see how to get the default “WooCommerce Shipping Zones Data” and in a second snippet we will instead see how to get the info for each vendor instead.

Either way, enjoy!

WooCommerce: Show Dispatch / Est. Shipping Date @ Single Product

A good way to inform online customers and avoid issues is showing the estimated delivery / dispatch time on the single product page, just below the “Add to Cart” button. Yes, you could do that manually by adding shipping info to each product short description, but the goal of Business Bloomer is to learn how to code that instead, so you won’t need to write things manually.

Also, this is great because if you change something in your dispatch rules, you just need to change the short PHP snippet and not all your product descriptions. It’s much more flexible this way.

Finally, in this post we’ll learn how to work with cut-off times (hour of the day) and current day of the week (pure PHP), so that we can show a “dynamic” notice based on current date. So, let’s see how it’s done!

WooCommerce: Add Shipping Phone @ Checkout

I’m surprised WooCommerce doesn’t offer this field out of the box. Most ecommerce websites actually require a shipping phone to organize delivery and communicate with the end customer in case there are problems.

Thankfully, there is a hook (filter) for that. It’s called “woocommerce_checkout_fields” and can be used to remove, move or add checkout fields quickly. And here’s how to add, for example, a new shipping field called “shipping_phone”. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Flat Rate Calculation Based on Weight (Without a Plugin!)

We already talked about weight based shipping and in this post we found out how to charge different flat rates based on shipping weight thresholds.

But now I want to show you how you can use the default “Flat Rate” to calculate shipping costs based on cart weight, thanks to a multiplier. For example, your shipping rate might be “$5 for each Kg” – as you know the default “Flat Rate” only allows you to define one rate e.g. $10.

So, what if you want to calculate shipping charges by weight? Well, here’s a simple workaround for you. Continue reading WooCommerce: Flat Rate Calculation Based on Weight (Without a Plugin!)

WooCommerce: Assign Free Shipping to a Single Product

Believe it or not, the answer to this very frequent question is inside the WooCommerce settings… so don’t worry too much about coding if you’re not a developer or purchasing yet another premium WooCommerce plugin!

From the WooCommerce shipping rates, you can select “Free Shipping” as a method but that would apply to ALL products – so how do you override the shipping settings and allow a single product to have free shipping, while keeping all the others on a Flat rate?

WooCommerce: Display $0.00 Amount For Free Shipping Rates

In the past, WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages used to show “$0.00” beside each free shipping rate. Now, this is gone and WooCommerce only shows the shipping rate name, without the 0 amount.

But given that many freelance clients requested this customization, today we’re bringing this back to life with just a few lines of PHP. Enjoy!