In the next release of Interspire Shopping Cart, the entire shipping system has been redeveloped to include shipping zones (different shipping settings based on the location), table rates (highly configurable shipping) and much more. These are features that a lot of our customers have been requesting so I've tried to create a very flexible system but keep it easy to configure at the same time too.

A shipping zone is a list of regions (based on either one or more countries, states or postcodes) that your store can ship to and within each of these zones there can be many different shipping methods each with their own independent settings that will be used to calculate shipping for customers who fall in to that zone.

When creating or editing a shipping zone, there are various options that you can choose to configure this zone with:
  • Zone Type
    The type of shipping zone you wish this zone to be. Here you can choose a zone based one or more countries, a zone based on one or more states in different countries, or enter a list of postcodes that apply to a particular country (with wildcards too, so you don't need to enter every single post code)
  • Free Shipping
    Free shipping can now be enabled or disabled per shipping zone and the order total to qualify for free shipping can also be adjusted per zone.
  • Handling
    You can choose to not apply any handling fee for this shipping zone, choose to apply a common handling fee for all shipping methods that are in this zone or specify a handling fee for each of the different methods in this zone.
  • Shipping Methods
    An unlimited amount of shipping methods can be created and customised for each shipping zone. (More information on this below)

Shipping zones are automatically calculated for each customer during the checkout process based on the best/closes matching zone. This allows you to create very powerful shipping rules/calculations based on the destination. The way this works is as follows:
  • If the customer's address matches a postcode in a postcode based zone, this shipping zone will be used. If there is a full match of the postcode rather than a wildcard match, the full match will be used over the wildcard based match.
  • If the customer's address matches a state in a state based zone, this shipping zone will be used.
  • If the customer's address matches a country in a country based zone, this shipping zone will be used.
  • If there are no matches at all, the customer will fall back in to the "Default Shipping Zone" that applies to every other location.
As I previously mentioned, in each shipping zone you can configure as many different combinations of shipping methods as you like. This is a huge improvement over the current shipping in Interspire Shopping Cart 3.1 where you couldn't enable a combination of fixed & real time shipping quotes and couldn't have multiple combinations of a single shipping method (for example, you couldn't have two "Ship by Order Total" methods enabled with differen names such as Express Shipping or Standard Shipping).


When editing a zone, the "Shipping Methods" tab allows you to manage the shipping methods for this zone. If there are multiple shipping methods in a zone, the customer is given the choice of which shipping method to apply to their order. This allows you to offer services such as express shipping, registered shipping or standard shipping and allow the customer to choose which applies to their order.

Creating a shipping method within a zone is just as simple as configuring shipping before, you select the shipping module that this method will use, you can optionally change the display name of this shipping method, and then you configure the shipping method properties/settings.



As you can see - there's quite a lot to the new shipping zones/methods functionality that's vastly improved over our old shipping support in Interspire Shopping Cart. Any feedback is always welcomed. Shortly I'll have an overview of the new customer shipping estimates feature on the front end of the store and two features that everyone's been waiting for: single page & guest checkout.