If you sell products that require shipping, you will need to either charge a flat shipping rate for each order or have a system to calculate shipping rates for each order item depending on its weight or dimension (length, width, height) during the checkout process. This process is quite complicated as each order is different. Thanksfully, with SiteGUI Commerce and Shipping app, this process will be simplified, you just need to set it once and then the app will take care of calculating the shipping rates for your store.

Before you can use the Shipping app to calculate the shipping rates, it is necessary to configure it to fit your online store. Click on the App Listing menu, choose Apps to list all available apps for your Site and then click on Configure for the Shipping app. The first thing you need to set is the measurement units for your products' weight and dimensions, these will be used to calculate the shipping rates based on the product weight and dimensions. You should use a consistent measurement units for all of your products, when you enter the weight and dimensions for each product, make sure they use the same units as you set them here.

The Shipping app supports calculating rates based on rate tables, it also supports getting real time shipping rates from shipping carriers such as UPS, Fedex, DHL etc. If you want to use a particular shipping carrier to get shipping rates and ship out your parcels, you'll need to add and enable that carrier. Please search for that carrier's app on the SiteGUI Appstore, shipping carrier apps are listed under the Delivery category.

The second thing you need to configure is the Shipping From Address, this should be your store or warehouse's address where your parcels will be shipped. This address will also be used as the From address to calculate real-time shipping rates by shipping carriers. 

A flat shipping rate is a fixed fee you will charge to ship an order no matter how many products the order is. This is suitable for products that shipping one or a few of them do not make any difference in shipping fee. To create such rate, click on the New menu and choose Shipping. You should then choose a name for the rate and specify which country and state the rate should apply to (can be left empty to match all countries/states). Multiple countries can be selected for a rate, in that case the state should be left empty. If the rate applies to multiple states/provinces of a country, it should be duplicated to support other states once it is fully configured.

Next, enter the estimated time to deliver the shipment, this will be given to your customers when they choose this shipping method. For a flat shipping rate, you just need to enter the fee into the Shipment Fee/Discount field and choose Enable to enable the rate. Now, this shipping method will be offered to customers if they specify a shipping address that matches this rate's country or state. If they choose it, the fixed shipping amount will be added to their orders.  

The flat shipping rate above can be adjusted based on the number of items in the order. There are 2 ways to set this up. The first way is to specify the Shipping Surcharge/Discount for each product so when there are more than one quantity of this product in the order, this specified amount will be multiplied with the number of the product to add up the shipping fee. This fee (not including per shipment fee above) will be linear i.e: $1 for 1 item, $10 for 10 items and $100 for 100 items. The second way is to use a quantity based rate table, you can set it up by specifying a fee/discount and the quantity from it the fee/discount will be applied. For example, if you enter (0, $2) and (10, $1) for (the quantity, the fee) respectively then if the number of a product is less than 10, the fee will be ($2 * the number) but if it is more than 10, it will be just ($1 * the number). In this case, the fee for 8 items ($16) is larger than that of 12 items ($12), you charge less shipping fee but you can sell more items. Please note that these 2 ways can be used at the same time to further adjust to shipping fee as you want.

There are other rate tables that you can also use, that is value based rate table and weight based rate table. The value based rate table can be used to offer discount shipping rate (use a negative amount) when the order amount reaches certain value. The setup is the same as the way we setup the quantity base rate table i.e: enter several pairs of value and fee/discount, if the order value exceeds a specified value, the associated fee/discount will be applied to each item. The weight based rate table is used to calculate the rate using product's weight and dimensions. For this to work, weight and dimensions must be specified for the products you want to use this method. Also, a dimensional weight factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_weight) must be specified to help converting dimensional weight to weight, if this weight is larger than the normal weight, it will be used to calculate rates. The setup is similar to other rate tables, using weight (rounded up) to determine the amount and then multiply the amount with the weight.

Most shipping carriers are able to provide real time shipping rates if you can pass the parcel weight and shipping destination to them. To use this method, you will need to enable a supported shipping carrier(s) and set the Weight-based calculation mode to Courier Rates. After that, the above dynamic rate will not use the weight based rate table for calculating rates but use the rates returned by shipping carriers together with other rate tables to determine the shipping rates.

Multiple shipping rates can be created and they can be overlapping. Click on the App Listing menu and choose Shipping to see all available rates. Each rate will show a base fee and indicate which rate tables (weight, value or quantity) or if carrier is used. Rates can be edited, cloned or deleted and must be active in order to be used for calculating shipping rates.