How do shipping zones work?

A zone is a group of countries you ship to at the same price. Each parcel is priced by the zone of the country it goes to. You set the price on your shipping rate card, one column per zone.

A new store starts with five zones: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Rest of EU and Rest of world. They are only a start. You can rename them, change their countries and add your own. To add or change one, click its column header on the rate card. You can delete any zone except the catch-all zone.

A country can sit in one zone only. Put it in a new zone, and it leaves the old one. Every country that no zone lists falls into the catch-all. That zone always exists, so no parcel is ever left without a zone. Orders that land there are flagged, because a country that shows up often deserves its own price. An order that arrives without any country is priced by the first zone in your list, and flagged too.

Each zone is a column on the rate card. A card prices by weight or by size, which you choose with Price by. By weight, a parcel takes the first row its weight fits into. By size, it takes the first row its products' packaging sizes, added up, fit into. A parcel with an unknown weight or size takes the zone's last price, the one for the biggest parcels, and is flagged.

An empty cell is skipped, and 0,00 means shipping there really costs nothing. A zone with no price on any active card is not free. Its parcels carry no shipping cost and are flagged on the Overview until you add a price. Pick and pack, packaging, return processing and packaging EPR are rules of their own beside the rate card. Every order runs through all of them.