Last updated - April 3, 2024
With huge competition building up in the e-commerce domain, having a flexible and unified shipping integration is a must. It helps customize your shipping needs and also saves on resources like time and money. Moreover, your customers also trust you for the swift and robust shipping services that you offer. Thankfully with WooCommerce, you can choose from a variety of plugins for your different shipping needs. But before we discuss them, let us dive in to understand the basics of a WooCommerce shipping plugin and what you must look for while choosing the one best for your store. Later in the post, we will also discuss the list of best WooCommerce shipping plugins.
Why a shipping plugin is a must-have for your WooCommerce store?
A shipping plugin is an integration that helps you automate your shipping requirements like printing labels, tracking orders, international shipping, bulk label generation, shipping rate calculator, and much more. These plugins help you reduce the related hassle and in a way serve as a third party to tackle your shipping concerns. To begin with, you can always choose a free plugin before choosing a Premium version or a price plan for maximum benefits. Following are some of the benefits that you can avail to fulfill your shipping needs,
- Saves Time and Money: A shipping plugin helps you save time and money at the least.
- Offers Diverse Delivery Options: The plugin helps provide a range of delivery options like multi-carrier features, flat rates, carrier-specific choices, packing automation, etc.
- Real-time Tracking: A shipping integration also helps in real-time shipment tracking and rate comparisons for different carriers. So that your customer can choose the best deal for their order.
- Provides a Competitive Edge: When you integrate a more advanced or unified shipping plugin into your WooCommerce store, you are bound to get an edge over your competitors. An efficient shipping plugin will offer you a diverse range of options like label printing, shipment calculator, multi-carrier facility, and a lot more to upgrade your WooCommerce store.
- Builds Credibility: Due to the ease of real-time shipment tracking, delivery, rate calculations, and more such features, customers tend to consider your store for a better shipping experience. Thereby improving your sales and brand value.
Key features to focus on while choosing a Shipping plugin
With a wide range of shipping plugins, it is always crucial to understand your business and products well before choosing a plugin. You must also consider your current and future shipment requirements to make a wise deal. Following is the list of the key parameters to consider while choosing a WooCommerce shipping plugin for your store,
- Robust Logistics Support: With a wide range of customers, the store owners must be ready to cater to various needs, whether domestic or international purchases, regarding logistics or even fulfillment. One must choose a reliable plugin vendor for support and troubleshooting assistance to ensure a better shipping flow.
- Unified Shipping Solution: A good shipping plugin must consolidate your shipping needs into a flexible, comprehensive, single platform. This multipurpose solution will reduce the complexity of managing multiple plugins and simplify the entire process.
- Prompt Shipment Tracking: Shipment Tracking is one of the key features customers look for while buying online. Hence, an accurate tracking system mapping different logistics stages will surely build confidence among your customers.
- Efficient Customization: Customization based on the type of carrier, delivery location, cart weight, shipping rates, printing labels, etc. gives you an edge over your competitors in the e-commerce marketplace. The feature not only helps the store owners but also the customers to attain a better deal.
- Flexible Rate Calculator: The ideal plugin must help you create a custom shipping rate method based on your shipping needs. With a flexible rate calculator, your customers can directly compare the shipping rates of different carriers for their purchases and make a decent choice.
- User-friendly Interface: An easy-to-use interface is always preferred by both merchants and customers. The feature reduces the learning curve and potential errors for your team and helps to manage the shipping settings easily. Also, the customers can then choose from the available options and avail a satisfactory delivery experience.
Some of the best WooCommerce Shipping Plugins
With the basic know-how and benefits of shipping plugins for WooCommerce, let us learn about some of the best WooCommerce shipping plugins to ease your shipping hassle. Dive in to know more,
ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express Shipping
This ELEX DHL shipping integration helps your store streamline DHL Express shipping by automating the checkout process that fetches the real-time rates offered by DHL Express APIs. As a shop owner, you can also configure the shipping options from the settings page. The customers can compare the best price and service and choose a carrier based on that.
More features of this plugin are as follows,
- Avail DHL real-time shipping rates for DHL shipping options such as DHL Paket, DHL Parcel, DHL eCommerce, etc.
- Shipping rates based on weight, postcode, etc. are available at the checkout page
- Pack your delivery items individually using built-in box packing or pack them based on the weight
- Track the estimated delivery date for each service in your store
- Allows you to print DHL return shipping labels
- The plugin offers more advanced features like creating and deleting shipments in bulk, auto shipment tracking, box packing, etc.
ReachShip
ReachShip is an effective multi-carrier shipping solution for WooCommerce-powered businesses. This plugin enables businesses to optimize their shipping processes and give dependable and speedy delivery choices to their clients.
This plugin, with its multi-carrier support, real-time shipping rates, shipping label creation, and other capabilities, assists companies in providing dependable and efficient shipping alternatives to their clients, hence enhancing the entire customer experience.
Some of the features of this plugin are as follows:
- This plugin supports numerous shipping services, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, Australia Post, and DHL, allowing businesses to select the carrier that best meets their needs.
- The plugin calculates shipping prices in real-time depending on the weight and location of the product, ensuring that clients receive accurate and up-to-date shipping rates.
- Experience hassle-free parcel packaging with its automated processes tailored to the weights and dimensions of your products.
- It automatically creates shipping labels and tracking numbers, removing the need for human data entry and lowering the chance of errors.
- Customers receive real-time tracking updates for their deliveries, which improves the customer experience and reduces the amount of questions and complaints.
- Businesses may use the plugin to print shipping labels in bulk, saving time and increasing efficiency.
- The ReachShip plugin makes it simple to schedule pickups for your shipments. You may schedule your pickups for the most convenient day, time, and place.
- Businesses may use the plugin to create shipping rules based on product weight, destination, and other factors, assuring precise and effective shipment management.
WooCommerce Weight-based Shipping
This plugin can ease the daunting task of calculating shipping rates based on the weight of the order or cart. Weight-based shipping for WooCommerce allows you to set up multiple rules based on different store strategies.
More features of this plugin are below,
- Set shipping rules based on order weight, shipping destination, cart subtotals, etc.
- You can set progressive or flat shipping rates based on the total weight of the cart
- Set up a conditional free shipping threshold using this plugin
- You can set minimum and maximum price constraints for any case
Conditional Shipping for WooCommerce
Conditional Shipping is one of the most valuable shipping plugins for WooCommerce stores when you need to disable shipping methods based on conditions. Moreover, it works well with your existing shipping zones and methods.
A few more benefits of this plugin are below,
- With the PRO version, set shipping rates based on conditions and much more
- Restrict flat rate, free shipping, pickup, or any other feature associated with the existing shipping methods or zones
- Offers support for dynamic-shipping rates like DHL and USPS
- Avail Debug mode for troubleshooting
- You can also try the basic version for the initial understanding
WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping
An excellent plugin by Jeroen Sormani, WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping helps you set up your own advanced rules to avail free shipping for your customers. The plugin has a very good response rate and gives you full control over free shipping rates for WooCommerce.
More features of this high-value smart plugin are as follows,
- You can create multiple ‘OR’ conditions or multiple ‘AND’ conditions within each shipping rate
- The plugin allows you to create your own custom conditions using code snippets
- It also allows you to set a free shipping threshold limit message
AST Fulfillment Manager PRO
AST or Advanced Shipment Tracking PRO by Zorem is an efficient plugin for WooCommerce that offers you access to tracking information for more than 300 shipping carriers. You can track widgets, track links, and track numbers with this WooCommerce plugin. Also, it is easier to automate the fulfillment workflow. You can also switch the order status from ‘Completed’ to ‘Shipped’ or ‘Partially Shipped’.
Checkout more features of this plugin below,
- You can track items that were ordered for different locations, individually
- Auto-detection feature will auto-fetch the shipment providers or drop-shippers based on the tracking number or order format
- Get a centralized fulfillment dashboard reflecting all your unfulfilled orders in a single snapshot
- Create a White Label shipping experience with a customized shipping provider’s name and logo
ELEX Hide WooCommerce Shipping Methods
This ELEX shipping plugin is another valuable plugin for WooCommerce that enables you to hide shipping methods based on multiple conditions like product categories, shipping class, destination, order weight, and more. You can also hide different shipping methods based on delivery carrier services from DHL, UPS, USPS, Australia Post, etc.
Read below for more information on this Premium plugin,
- This conditionally hide plugin helps you hide shipping methods when ‘free shipping’ is available
- Get a vast list of filters to customize or hide your shipping methods
- Hide shipping methods for different shipping classes or no class as well
- You can also hide shipping methods based on Product SKU or even Postal/Zip Code
- Hide shipping methods based on user roles or vendors
- You can also combine multiple rules to create a single advanced rule
AfterShip Order Tracking
As the name suggests, AfterShip offers an all-in-one shipment tracking for your WooCommerce store. The plugin is easy to use and can build strong confidence in your customer base regarding shipment services. As soon as you integrate this plugin, you can get going by adding the tracking numbers and courier details to your admin panel.
More details about AfterShip Tracking are as below,
- Access to a user-friendly and sleek dashboard, to sort shipments and configure a promised delivery date
- The plugin comes with an AfterShip Tracking button for effortless order tracking
- Automatically imports tracking information
- Get delivery updates via SMS or email notifications
- You can integrate your shipping needs with 1000+ shipping providers
Order Delivery Date PRO
Get rid of the complexities of handling deliveries and pickups like product type, packing time, pickup locations, etc. for your WooCommerce store with this plugin. The plugin claims to be adept at taking care of your concerns regarding product pickup, preferred delivery date, and type of delivery.
More Premium features of this WooCommerce shipping plugin are listed below,
- Perfect solution for local delivery or pickup
- Create different delivery schedules earliest by the same day or the next day
- Customized delivery solutions based on shipping category, delivery type, and pickup location
- Set charges for unique delivery days like weekdays or special dates and get automated updates
- Sync real-time tracking and organization with Google Calendar Integration
YITH Multiple Shipping Addresses for WooCommerce
This Premium plugin by YITH allows your customers to set up different delivery addresses for the products purchased within the same order. This feature will help motivate customers to purchase more products with the same order. Surely, the plugin will multiply sales during festive seasons and holidays.
The key features of this plugin are as follows,
- Allows multi-shipping for each order
- The users can manage shipping addresses from the Checkout and My Account pages
- You can also enable/disable multi-shipping for product variations
- You can also send email notifications to customers once the status of the order has changed
- You can also exclude certain products or categories from multi-shipping
Conclusion
Shipping is one of the key factors that can affect your business exponentially in the e-commerce space. With the precise list of best WooCommerce shipping plugins mentioned above, you can choose any plugin that best suits your store’s needs. These plugins will help you ease the complexity of shipping and smoothen the logistics flow. Moreover, with accurate shipment tracking and delivery, your store will gain solid brand value, build trust among customers, and achieve new heights in no time. For more such informative posts, choose LearnWoo as your learning partner.
