Shipping

Shipping has two halves, and they answer different questions.

Rates decide what a buyer is quoted at checkout. A rate lists the countries it serves, what the buyer pays, and how long delivery takes.

Shipments record what actually left your warehouse. A shipment records the units that went out, the carrier, and the tracking number.

Three records carry all of it:

ShippingRate
Shipment
ShipmentItem

The work lives at:

Orders → Shipping

That page has a Shipments tab and a Delivery Rates tab.

Geography is the country list

Each rate carries a list of the country codes it serves.

An empty list serves everywhere.

A rate can also be pinned to the location that fulfills it, which is how you keep a rate tied to the warehouse that can actually send it.

There is no separate zone builder. The country list on the rate is the geography.

That is a deliberate simplification. Zones are an extra layer that has to be kept in step with the rates attached to it, and a rate that names its own countries cannot drift out of agreement with a zone definition somewhere else.

To change where a rate applies, you edit the rate.

Free shipping is a rate, not a switch

There is no free-shipping toggle.

A rate priced at zero with a minimum order amount is your free-shipping rate.

Checkout applies it once the cart clears the minimum, and the cart shows how much more the buyer needs to spend to reach it.

Because it is an ordinary rate, it also gets everything ordinary rates have: the country list that limits where it applies, and the delivery days that give it an arrival window.

Arrival windows, not just day counts

A rate carries a minimum and a maximum number of delivery days.

Checkout does not show the buyer those numbers. It turns them into real dates, using:

• Your handling time
• The weekdays you ship on
• The holiday closures you have listed

Real dates tell a buyer something a "3–5 business days" label cannot, because the calculation already knows you do not pack on Sundays and are closed over a holiday.

That configuration lives at:

Settings → Fulfillment

It is a list of working days and closed dates. There is no calendar view of pending shipments — the fulfillment calendar is an input to the quote, not a view of your workload.

Shipping an order in parts

A shipment holds specific quantities of specific order lines.

So one order can go out in several boxes, each with its own carrier and tracking number, and each recorded separately.

The admin will not let you allocate more units of a line than remain on the order. The remaining figure is tracked per line, which is what makes it safe to split an order without keeping count yourself.

Tracking links are built for you

Enter a carrier and tracking number, and the shipment gets a tracking URL for:

USPS
UPS
FedEx
DHL

Other carriers keep the URL you supply, so a regional or freight carrier is not locked out — you just provide the link yourself.

Statuses that cannot skip

A shipment's status moves along a defined path.

The status dropdown only offers the moves that are legal from where the shipment is now, and the server rejects any other move.

Both halves matter. The dropdown keeps the interface honest; the server check is what actually enforces it, so a stale browser tab or a repeated click cannot push a shipment into a state it never passed through.

Two statuses are terminal:

picked up
returned

A shipment that has reached either one is finished, and there is no move out of it.

Frozen during a chargeback

An order with an open dispute cannot be fulfilled.

Goods sent against a payment that is being reversed are goods you are unlikely to see again, so the block is on the order rather than on your memory.

Where each setting lives

• Rates, and the countries and prices on them: Delivery Rates, under Orders → Shipping
• Shipments, carriers, and tracking: Shipments, under Orders → Shipping
• Handling time, shipping weekdays, holiday closures: Settings → Fulfillment

Which one do I change

Change a rate when the question is about what a buyer is offered or charged: where you ship, what it costs, how fast you promise it, or when shipping becomes free.

Change Settings → Fulfillment when the question is about when you are actually working. The rate's delivery days stay the same; the dates the buyer sees move.

Record a shipment when goods physically leave, and record one per box rather than one per order when an order goes out in parts.

The distinction to hold on to:

A rate is a promise you are making, and a shipment is a fact you are recording.

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