If you are selling items that need to be shipped by mail order, it is quite likely that you want to charge a part of this cost to the customer. Pearl has a powerful shipping structure that allows you to define an unlimited number of shipping methods, and limit the shipping methods available to different geographical regions.
Shipping Zones
Click Website->Shipping Zones from the main menu.
Create a shipping zone for each country or group of countries that you wish to ship to. For Example:
- Zone 1: United Kingdom
- Zone 2: United Kingdom (offshore) – Jersey, Guernsey etc
- Zone 3: Europe
- Zone 4: USA
- Zone 5: Rest of World
Once you have created each zone you need to edit the list of countries within the zone. The two-character country codes used can be viewed at Setup->Countries; these are the ISO standard codes.
Shipping Methods
Click Website->Shipping methods from the main menu. Here you can create a number of shipping methods. When an order is set to “packed” by your staff, they are required to choose one of these shipping methods. All of the methods appear for the packing staff. You can give a shipping method a name that will only appear for the customer, but is more informative for your staff, for example “Next Day Service” could appear for the customer and “UPS Before 9am” could appear in the admin area.
Only shipping methods set to &lsquot;public&rsquot; appear for the customer to choose when they checkout online. To restrict a certain shipping method to certain geographical regions as defined by the customers delivery address, enter a comma separated list of country codes for that shipping method.
On this screen you also define the breaks at which the customer is charged the next highest price. You can choose for this break to be by weight or by order value. Note that if you choose to change the breaks at any point all the shipping price information for that shipping method will be deleted. Don’t forget to create a &lsquot;catch-all&rsquot; break so that the customer does not get free shipping if they fall off the end of your list of breaks.
For example:
Price breaks at 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 will give the customer free shipping if their order value is over £500.
Price breaks at 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 9999 will charge the customer at the 9999 rate for large orders.
Shipping prices
Once you have defined your shipping zones and shipping methods, you can now enter what the customer should be charged.
Click Website->Shipping Prices, then select a shipping method to enter the prices for each zone.
Note: these prices are net (without VAT) so to charge a UK customer £2.00 total shipping, enter 1.702.
2.00 / 1.175 = 1.702
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