Adding and Managing Destination Zones
Aleks avatar
Written by Aleks
Updated over a week ago

The areas that you ship to are called destination or shipping zones. Each shipping method in your store can be limited to a certain destination zone so that the rate only applies to customers whose shipping addresses are within this area.

Destination zones in your store can be limited to the world regions, countries, states, and, when restricted by postcodes or zip codes, to cities, towns, and streets.

Creating destination zones

To create a new destination zone:

  1. From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup or to Settings → Taxes. Click on a shipping method or click Manage Tax Rates and click Manage zones.

  2. Click Add New Zone.

  3. Click Add Country to restrict the zone to a specific country, select this country from the list and click Add countries to confirm your choice.

TIP: Click Add Region to select all countries that belong to a certain region like North America, European Union, or Africa in bulk.

4. Click Add State to restrict the zone to a specific state in the country, select this state from the list and click the Add States to confirm your choice.

TIP: If you are going to ship to all states within the selected country, leave the State list empty.

5. Fill out the Zip/Postal codes field to restrict the zone to certain locations within the state, e.g. cities, towns and streets.

6. Click Save.

TIP: You can use wildcard symbols to build the list of zip/postal codes:

  • “?” matches any single character,

  • “*” matches any number of characters, including zero. Spaces will be ignored.

  • “_” matches any number of spaces (at least one).

Adding or removing an area from the destination zone

To add or remove an area from the already configured destination zone:

  1. From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup → Zones.

  2. Select the zone that you want to edit.

  3. Click Add country or Add state to add another country or state to the shipping location.

  4. Click the Trash can icon to remove an area from the shipping location.

5. Click Save.

Assigning destination zones for shipping methods

When you create a new shipping method, you can select the destination zone to which it will apply:

  1. From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup.

  2. Click Add Shipping Method.

  3. On Step 3 of the shipping, setup chooses the destination zone from the Shipping region drop-down.

4. Click Save & Finish.

To change the destination zone for the already configured shipping method:

  1. From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup.

  2. Click Actions → Edit next to the enabled shipping method.

  3. Select a destination zone from the Shipping region drop-down under the Shipping settings block.

  4. Click Save.

Setting up destination zones for the UK

If you ship your products to the UK, you need to keep in mind a few peculiarities about the zones set up for the UK.

Since there is no standard and a finalized list of UK counties that should be used in online stores, calculating a shipping rate for the UK will only require a Country name and a Postal code.

At checkout when the UK is selected as a “Ship to” country, the State will be displayed as a text field, not a drop-down list that requires selection. Customers will be able to input any county name to the State field or leave it empty. They may also mistype.

Due to the above, we recommend to leave the list of States in the UK Zone settings empty and use the postal codes for restricting the delivery zones.

Here is a sample zone set up for shipping to all areas across the UK.

If you need to offer different rates for different areas in the UK, you can restrict the zones by postal codes, so that the shipping rate applies to the addresses that are covered by these postal codes.

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