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, apply price breaks (by weight, total price or quantity) and limit the shipping methods available to different geographical regions. This allows you to automatically assign the correct price to customers depending on their location and the size of their order.
Name Shipping Methods as you wish, using a different name for your website customers than you use in the back-office, perhaps something more descriptive would be informative for staff. For example, "Next Day Service" could appear for the customer and "UPS Before 9am" could appear in the admin area.
Shipping Methods can be selected on orders raised in the back-office but will not apply the prices; these need to be added as a line item on the sales order (which can be done quickly and simply using the Shipping Quote system). It is however, useful to keep a record of the shipping method on these orders so that your warehouse manager can filter goods-out notes by shipping method and ensure those deliveries are packed and ready to go; perhaps the Royal Mail ones get collected at 1400, whereas your DHL collection comes at 1700.
You can also include the shipping method on templates, such as packing notes, so your packing notes for Royal Mail (for example) are printed with a PPI mark and two addresses at the top for peel-off labels, whereas your DHL packing note may have "track your package here" information.
Setting Up
When you setup your shipping you need to set up the Shipping Methods and Zones before the Shipping Prices. Once they have been created they can be selected within sales orders (for reference only) and on your website when customer place an order to automatically apply the relevant cost (if the method is set to be active at checkout).
1. Shipping Methods
Shipping Methods are used to define the different types of delivery method that might be used. For example:
- First Class
- Express Delivery
- Free Super Saver Delivery
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
To add new shipping methods:
- Go to Setup > Shipping > Shipping methods.
- Click the Add a shipping method button.
- Enter a back-office admin name (what your staff will see).
- Enter a name to display in the website checkout (what your customers select).
- Enter a short summary for the website checkout to help customers understand what they are getting.
- Select the break type to define how shipping costs are incremented, e.g. quantity of items.
- Define the breaks in prices, e.g. 10 more items/grams/pounds will mean a higher shipping price (prices are defined separately).
- (Optional) 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.
- Specify whether the method is active on the website, only shipping methods set to 'public' appear for the customer to choose when they checkout online.
- Select a specific packing note template if you'd like it be different from the standard.
- Click Save.
Once you have defined Shipping Methods, create your Shipping Zones.
2. Shipping Zones
Shipping Zones allow you to apply different Shipping Prices depending on where the customer is ordering from; this comes from their address details. 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
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
To add a Shipping Zone:
- Go to Setup > Shipping > Shipping zones.
- Click the Add shipping zone button.
- Enter a name for the zone.
- Enter a comma separated list of country codes this zone covers.
You can now define the Shipping Prices per Zone and Method.
3. Shipping Prices
Once you have defined your shipping zones and shipping methods, you can now enter what the customer should be charged.
- Go to Setup > Shipping > Shipping Prices.
- From the drop-down menu select a shipping method to enter the prices for each zone.
- You can manually enter the VAT exclusive price per break per zone. To quickly copy the same prices across more than zone, enter the prices in the Quick-add fields and then use the Copy from quick-add row link against each zone to apply those price to.
- Click the Save changes button.
Note: These prices are net (without VAT) so to charge a UK customer £2.00 total shipping, enter 1.667.
2.00 / 1.20 (T20) = 1.667
Price Breaks
The breaks are defined on the Shipping Method and the cost on the Shipping Price per Shipping Zone.
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 price break 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 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, i.e. shipping zones cannot overlap to include a country in more than one zone.
Adding Shipping Methods to Templates
You can add the Shipping Method to templates, such as packing notes. Amend your template to include this widget:
_shipMethodName_
