Shipping services in WebShop

Purpose and scope

As a merchant, you may have complex delivery charges that you wish to apply to your customer's cart. Perhaps you want to base your shipping charges on a specific set of products? Maybe, you wish to apply a different shipping charge based on the delivery country? Or you want to create a hierarchy of shipping charges based on more complex rules.

Our shipping services feature offers you more control and flexibility over how you configure and manage shipping rules and charges. Shipping services are set up in Aphix Management Interface.

The purpose of this feature is to describe what shipping services are, how you configure them and how your customers use them.

Remember

By default, a newly created Shipping Service is set to Inactive. Set to Active once you are happy with its configuration.
Click Save once you make changes to any of these settings in Aphix Management Interface. The changes are applied immediately in WebShop provided that the shipping service status is set to Active.

Benefits

Key benefits of delivery charges:

Supports your business processes by providing different shipping options.
Greater flexibility and control over creating and managing rules around your shipping charges.
Automatically applies the selected delivery charge when either your customer checkouts or updates their cart.

Introducing terms and concepts used in this article

Term	Definition
Charge rule	A charge rule consists of three elements: a metric, which the item that shipping calculations are performed on. Supported metrics are: Cart net total Cart gross total Delivery country Shipping zone - a defined group of countries Customer code Customer group - a defined group of customers Delivery postcode Cart contents based on product code Pricing properties that have been imported from your ERP and mapped to the pricing table on our platform a rule type or operator, which is used to compare the base item against the amount. Each metric has a set of allowable operands. The operands displayed are based on the metric type; strings will typically operands like "one of" while numbers will typically have operands like "greater than or equal to". a value, which is the metric used to compare against.
Charge type	defines how shipping charges are calculated against the total value of all products contained in the cart. The following charge types are supported: ERP pricing: a ‘shipping product code’ with an associated fee is configured in your ERP. It is imported as part of the regular product catalogue import from your ERP. Flat fee: a flat rate delivery amount is entered, and added to the cart as a shipping fee. Cart net percentage (%): the shipping charge is calculated as a percentage of the cart’s net total. No charge: no shipping charge is applied to the cart’s total
Flat rate delivery charge	a shipping product type that indicates the cost of delivery. The same delivery charge is applied regardless of the value of the order.
Pricing property	Context: for use with Shipping Service configuration a metric that has been imported from your ERP, mapped to the pricing table in our platform and available for use to configure a charge rule.
Shipping product code	a product code that has been assigned for use as a shipping code.
Shipping service	a shipping method comprising of a set of service rules and service charges.
Service charge	A service charge consists of four elements: a product code, which is set to a product type of shipping. It is active and visible in the product catalogue. a charge type, which is the method used to calculate the shipping amount due for the cart contents. Supported charge types are: Flat fee Cart net percentage (%) ERP pricing No charge an amount, which defines the shipping cost. a priority which allows you to define the order in which charges are applied when calculating shipping fees.

Fitting it all together

Each shipping service consists of a service name, a label, a priority and a status. The service name identifies each service charge, while the label specifies what is shown in the Shipping Method drop-down list in WebShop. Service charge names and labels may be identical or different. Initially, the status is set to Inactive, allowing you time to set up your shipping service prior to its application in WebShop. Once the status has been set to Active, any changes saved are applied immediately in WebShop. Each shipping service can have one or more service charges associated with it. Each service charge can have one or more charge rules associated with it.

Think of each shipping service you set up in your Aphix Management Interface as one entry in the drop-down box under Shipping Methods in Aphix WebShop. A priority can be applied to each service, with the highest priority set as the default in the Shipping Method in WebShop. Only shipping services that can be applied to the cart are listed in the drop-down list in WebShop.

Each shipping service consists of one or more service charges. Each service charge consists of a shipping product code, a charge type, an amount and a priority. The charge type specifies how you wish to calculate the shipping fee; as standard, it can be calculated:

As a flat fee,
As a percentage of the cart total,
Through shipping rules set up in your ERP and imported regularly into WebShop,
Apply no charge.

Each service charge has one or more charge rules associated with it. The charge rules specify what criteria must be met for this service charge to be listed in the Shipping Method drop-down box in WebShop or PocketShop.

You can configure charge rules at two levels:

Shipping service - these rules apply in all scenarios. For example, apply a specific delivery charge to all customers from a specific postcode regardless of the quantity or cost of the order they place.
Service charge - these rules apply when all the rules within a service charge apply. For example, apply a specific delivery charge to customer who spend a certain amount and belong to a specific customer group.

Select a metric, rule type and value to define when to apply this service charge to the cart. The list of metrics includes cart net total, shipping country, shipping zone, customer code, customer group, cart contents and any pricing property that has been imported from your ERP and mapped to the pricing table on our platform. Each metric has a different set of rule type associated with it, based on the metric type. All the rules in a service charge must be true for the associated shipping method to be applied. Within a service, a priority can be applied to each service charge with the highest priority being applied first.

Example

Suppose you are a merchant shipping widgets to the following locations - Ireland, UK, EU. You've already set up a shipping product code and have configured the countries you wish to deliver to.

Now, you want to configure your shipping fees, and have the following requirements:

You'd like to charge shipping based on either a flat rate or a percentage of the cart total, the delivery location and the speed of delivery.
You've defined the speed of delivery as either Next Day or Within 7 business days.
You've determined that the rules you'd like to include are:
- Speed of delivery is Next Day and cart totals between £0 and £500 AND shipping country is Ireland or UK, you want to apply a 5% shipping charge.
- Speed of delivery is Next Day, and cart totals between £0 and £500 AND shipping country is EU, you want to apply a 10% shipping charge.
- Speed of delivery is Next Day, and cart totals greater than £500 and regardless of delivery location, you want to apply a Flat Fee of £50
- Speed of delivery is Within 7 business days, and cart totals between £0 and £500 AND shipping country is Ireland or UK, you want to apply a Flat Fee of £20.
- Speed of delivery is Within 7 business days, and cart totals between £0 and £500 AND shipping country is EU, you want to apply a Flat Fee of £35.
- Speed of delivery is Within 7 business days, and cart totals greater than £500 and regardless of delivery location, you want to apply a Flat Fee of £40.
You've done your market research and you know that most of your customers are in Ireland or the UK, so you'd like Next Day delivery for that country set to be the default in your WebShop.

In this example, we would recommend that you would base your fees around speed of delivery, so you create two shipping services:

Next day
Within 7 Business Days

Then you create three service charges and apply different charge rules to each one, based on the criteria set out in the example.

Shipping service (Shipping method)

Service charge

Charge rule

Next Day

Service charge #1 specifies

to calculate the shipping fee based on 5% of the cart total.
to set the priority as 2. Effectively, this sets this service charge as the default since the highest priority is automatically applied to your customer's cart.

Service charge #1 applies if the following rules are true:

Total of the cart is between £0 and £500 AND
Delivery location is one of Ireland or UK.

Service charge #2 specifies

to calculate the shipping fee based on 10% of the cart total.
to set the priority as 2. Effectively, this means your customer must select this option from the drop-down menu presented to them.

Service charge #2 applies if the following rules are true:

Total of the cart is between £0 and £500 AND
Delivery location is in a country zone of EU.

Service charge #3 specifies

to calculate the shipping fee as a £50 flat fee.
to set the priority as 1. Effectively, this means your customer must select this option from the drop-down menu presented to them.

Service charge #3 applies if the following rules are true:

Total of the cart is greater than £500

Within 7 business days