Live Shipping Rates
Live Shipping Rates let you display real-time shipping costs at checkout, calculated directly by your integrated shipping carrier based on the order’s weight, dimensions, and destination. Instead of using fixed shipping rates, your customers always see the actual carrier rate for their order.
Scenario: Patricia runs an online home decor store and ships orders to customers in different cities. A customer orders a 5 kg lamp and enters their delivery address at checkout. Zoho Commerce sends the lamp’s weight, dimensions, and destination to the integrated carrier, which returns a shipping rate of $18. Patricia applies a $2 markup to cover packaging costs, so the customer sees a live shipping rate of $20 at checkout.
What Are Live Shipping Rates?
When a customer places an order, Zoho Commerce sends the order details, including item dimensions and weight, to the integrated shipping carrier. The carrier returns the applicable rate, which is then displayed to the customer at checkout.
Note: If the carrier provides more than one applicable rate for an order, all of them will be displayed to the customer at checkout, and the customer can choose the preferred shipping option.
You can control the shipping rates shown to customers by applying a markup or markdown for a specific range, and choosing a rounding option. This allows you to cover handling costs, such as packaging materials and overhead costs, without changing your shipping carrier agreement. Refer to the Configure Live Shipping Rates for more details.
How It Works
Live shipping rates are calculated based on the dimensions and weight of the items in the order, as well as the destination address. The “Ship in Separate Package” option determines whether each item is shipped individually or combined into packages, which affects how the shipping carrier calculates the rate. Refer to the Ship in Separate Package section for more details.
The calculation differs based on the package configuration you choose. For more details, refer to the Configure Package For Live Shipping Rates section.
Note: Live shipping rates can be enabled for only one shipping carrier at a time. If you have multiple carriers integrated, you can choose which one to use for live shipping rates. Refer to the Configure Live Shipping Rates section for more details.
Set Up Live Shipping Rates
Setting up live shipping rates involves two steps:
Configure Package For Live Shipping Rates - Choose whether to calculate rates using product dimensions or predefined package dimensions.
Configure Live Shipping Rates - Enable live shipping rates for a carrier, then set rate adjustments such as markup or markdown the rate by percentage or fixed amount, and choose a rounding option. You can also set the maximum weight per package to limit the weight of each package for shipping.