Customize WooCommerce Shipping Cost Per Item

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro (4)

Being a WooCommerce store owner, the one thing that will always interest you is the ability to customize and personalize things based on your preferences. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro aims at this very thing. This plugin is aimed at customizing WooCommerce shipping scenarios based on various factors. These factors include,

  • The Weight of the products (total and per unit)
  • The Quantity of the products (total and per unit)
  • Price of the products (total and per unit)
  • Shipping location (Country-City-State-ZIP Code)
  • Product category / Shipping Class

A store owner can use this plugin to customize the shipping options based on all these factors. And this way he can provide shipping choices to customers on his/her terms. But the area where this plugin excels is the ease and simplicity with which it achieves seemingly complex shipping scenarios. In this article, we will focus on the scenario where you can configure WooCommerce shipping cost per item, for your customers. But before digging deep into the procedure, let’s check out one simple shipping scenario.

Shipping, Per item…

Consider the shipping scenario if Joe, who owns an online retail store based in California, US. Joe has a variety of products which he sells across the country. But to keep the demand going, and his customers happy, he has found a way that will make him the first choice when it comes to his customers. According to Joe, his top customers purchase products in bulk. And most of the time they have to face a heavy shipping price. But Joe is planning to counter that with a solution that will allow him to personalize his WooCommerce shipping cost per item, and not per weight. According to Joe, he wants his customers to pay shipping cost based on the following factors:

  • Free Shipping if there is only one product in the cart.
  • Shipping cost of $10 up to 3 items in the cart.
  • Shipping cost of $15 up to 5 items in the cart.
  • Up to 10 items shipping will be charged $24.
  • If the cart contains more than 10 items then the shipping will be charged as $30 fixed and $0.5 per additional item. 

Now let’s check out how this shipping scenario can be configured using WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro plugin.

How to configure WooCommerce shipping per item?

As discussed, WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro allows WooCommerce store owners to configure shipping rates based on so many factors. In the plugin settings, you can easily find Matrix Columns containing all the factors based on which shipping can be configured. Take a look at the matrix columns below.

Table rate matrix column

The matrix column named Item is clearly visible among all the others. Along with this, you need to select the Rate Based On matrix column. This will allow shipping rates to be modified based on factors like weight, price and the number of items in the cart. Apart from these two columns, you need to select other columns as Method title, Method Group, Base Cost and Cost per Unit. Once these are selected, all you need to do is create shipping rules based on your preference. Take a look at the shipping rules configured using WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro for Joe’s shipping scenario.

Table rate rules

It is clearly visible that the shipping rules are placed in one group so that under no circumstances, more than one shipping cost is shown to the customers. Also, it’s pretty easy to configure the whole scenario. The following video shows how easy the process of configuring WooCommerce shipping cost per item can be. Take a look.

In this video, you can easily see how easily WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro handles the WooCommerce shipping cost per item.

A Special Case…

While a simple shipping scenario where the shipping cost is calculated per item may be a little too easy to configure, it can still resolve some challenging business scenarios. For instance, Joe also sells some small products which are sold as a single pack with multiple units. Take the case of Screws. Joe sells a single package of screws that contains 1000 units. Configuring shipping per item in such a case may not be as simple as we have already discussed. To handle such scenarios, WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro has a free of cost addon, named, WooCommerce Per Products Shipping Add-onIt allows the product to have an additional field where the store owner can add the units that one package of that product contains. Check out the image below as it will give you a much clearer idea of the plugin’s functionality.

Units per product

Using this plugin can help a lot of store owners who, just like Joe, sell products which have multiple units in one package. This plugin will convert the number of units that are packed in a single package of the product, to the product item. Once it is done, you can easily create shipping rules in a similar manner based on the quantity of the screws in one package. The image below shows a shipping rule based on the quantity of the screws ranging from 0 to 5000 (5 pack of screws with 1000 units each).

Per item rules

This way if the customers select say, 2 packs of screws (2000 units), the shipping cost per item will be calculated as $0.5 + $0.005 x 2000 = $10.50

The image below shows what happens when the customer adds 2 screw packs in the cart.

Shipping rates on the cart

Summary…

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro serves as the best shipping solution for WooCommerce store owners. Be it WooCommerce shipping per item or shipping per weight, this plugin is surely in a league of its own. This article is aimed at those store owners who want a plugin flexible enough to let them personalize the shipping based on their own preferences. By providing factors such as weight, quantity, price, shipping location, etc. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin is a one-stop plugin that can take any possible any challenge put in front of it.


This was all about configuring the WooCommerce shipping cost per item, but if you want to know about how WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro deals with shipping scenarios, where the shipping cost needs to be calculated based on the weight of the products, you can check out our article focused on Weight Based Shipping using WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro. If you have any queries regarding the plugin or any configuration based on the factors mentioned in the article, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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