If you are selling items that need to be shipped by mail order, it is quite likely that you want to charge a part of this cost to the customer. Brightpearl has a powerful shipping structure that allows you to define an unlimited number of shipping methods, and limit the shipping methods available to different geographical regions.
Shipping Methods
Click Website > Setup > Shipping methods from the main menu. Here you can create a number of shipping methods. When an order is set to “packed” by your staff, they are required to choose one of these shipping methods. All of the methods appear for the packing staff. You can give a shipping method a name that will only appear for the customer, but is more informative for your staff, for example “Next Day Service” could appear for the customer and “UPS Before 9am” could appear in the admin area.
Only shipping methods set to 'public' appear for the customer to choose when they checkout online. To restrict a certain shipping method to certain geographical regions as defined by the customers delivery address, enter a comma separated list of country codes for that shipping method.
Shipping Breaks
Shipping breaks allow you to charge a variable shipping charge corresponding to one of three order properties:
- Total order weight (in grammes)
- Totals order price
- Number of items
Shipping Matrix example 1:
| Break (weight/g) | 0 | 100 | 500 | 1000 | 5000 | 9999999 |
| Shipping Zone Charge (ex tax) | 0 | 5.000 | 10.000 | 15.000 | 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
An order weighing 750g would fall within the 1000g pricebreak and hence cost £15 (ex).
An order weighing 1Kg would also cost £15 as breaks are inclusive.
Orders over 1Kg (1000g) are set to be free as they fall within the 5000g break.
Note:
- Breaks are inclusive - orders up to and including the break will be charged at a given break's corresponding cost.
- Prices are NET of tax - see Shipping prices below.
- Free Shipping requires a Zero first break. Best to include it from the outset, even if you don't use it.
Free shipping is applied at the per product level on the product edit page, or with a discount voucher. - Top Break - set a catch-all top break.
Remember, breaks are inclusive, so a very large order may tip over the highest break if the break is not large enough.
Shipping Prices
Once you have defined your shipping zones and shipping methods, you can now enter what the customer should be charged. Click Website > Setup > Shipping Prices, then select a shipping method to enter the prices for each zone.
Note: these prices are net (without VAT) so to charge a UK customer £2.00 total shipping, enter 1.702.
2.00 / 1.175 (T1) = 1.702
Shipping Zones
Click Website > Setup > Shipping Zones from the main menu. Create a shipping zone for each country or group of countries that you wish to ship to. For Example:
Zone 1: United Kingdom
Zone 2: United Kingdom (offshore) – Jersey, Guernsey etc
Zone 3: Europe
Zone 4: USA
Zone 5: Rest of World
Once you have created each zone you need to edit the list of countries within the zone. The two-character country codes used can be viewed at Setup - Localisation - Countries; these are the ISO standard codes.
ISO 3 letter country codes
ISO 2 letter country codes
Shipping Matrix Example 2:
| Break (weight/g) | 0 | 100 | 500 | 1000 | 5000 | 9999999 |
| Zone 1 (United Kingdom) | 0 | 5.000 | 10.000 | 15.000 | 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| Zone 2 (United Kingdom (offshore)) | 0 | 10.000 | 20.000 | 30.000 | 40.0000 | 50.0000 |
The above example shows that you can charge differing amounts according to which shipping zone the delivery country lies in.
Note: All zones are displayed for all shipping methods, regardless of which countries are enabled for the given shipping method.
Also, each country can only be included in a single shipping zone - ie: shipping zones cannot overlap to include a country in more than one zone.
