The cost of shipping is one of the most important factors a customer takes into account when placing an order through an e-commerce store. If the shipping cost is surprisingly high, the customer is more likely than not to abandon their cart. As a store owner, you don't want customers abandoning their carts, you want customers to complete their purchase, receive their goods, tell all their friends and relatives about your great service, and come marching straight on back through your virtual doors with pockets bulging with cash.
Magento comes equipped with the tools to be able to offer this level of service by setting up multiple shipping methods and rates, ensuring you are catering for every customer requirement. By communicating through orders, comments, statuses, and customized transactional e-mails, you are breathing personality through your Magento system. Not only this, but also understanding how to configure Magento's shipping settings will make life as a store owner so much easier. No more confusion between an order that's processing but not shipped and an order that's "processing" but not invoiced.
More importantly, we will learn how to set up as many free shipping options as you possibly can—one of the biggest online factors between a customer heading for the exit and a customer sailing straight through the checkout.
Configuring shipping settings (Must know) tells you everything you need to know in terms of setting up a Magento store to work with your chosen shipping method, from configuring tax rules and rates to setting up your shipping origin.
Choosing your shipping method (Must know) explores the differences between the Flat Rate, Table Rates, and Free Shipping methods, as well as teaches you how to disable a shipping method and configure your Table Rates.
Configure your products for shipping (Must know) helps you understand the differences between simple, configurable, grouped, bundle, virtual, and downloadable product types and how they affect your shipping calculations.
Advanced shipping methods (Should know) teaches you how to install a new shipping method, configure and enable it, as well as how to configure the DHL shipping method.
Shipping your orders (Should know) teaches you how to create a new shipment for an order, learn how to append comments to keep in contact with your customer, notify them of any changes, and add a tracking code for your customer to monitor their parcels progress.
Changing order status for shipping stage (Become an expert) explains how to create custom order statuses for your orders in order to remove confusion between shipped orders that all have the same status, but in reality are at different stages of the shipment process.
Shipping promotions and discounts (Become an expert) breaks into the sometimes complicated shopping cart price rules system and helps you create a new free shipping promotion tailored to a certain region using the customers shipping address.
Handling your shipping reports (Become an expert) looks into the built-in Magento shipping reports and how it breaks down the reports into the different orders using different shipping methods.
Customizing your shipping e-mails (Become an expert) explains how the default Magento transactional e-mail templates can be customized easily and assigned to be sent out when a new shipment has been created for an order.
You'll need a Magento store set up and ready to configure, some of these recipes require Magento 1.5+ (for the Changing order status for shipping stage recipe). You'll also need administrator level access or sufficient privileges to edit the paths required in this book.
Are you in charge of shipping your Magento orders? Are you fed up with losing track of which order has been shipped, which is delayed, and which is complete? Do you want to offer your customers more shipping methods and rates and better promotions? If so then this book provides answers to all of this and more.
This book is aimed at Magento store owners themselves, or those who are in charge of configuring their Magento shipping settings. It is also useful for those who have a good working knowledge of the Magento administration panel, but who wish to further their understanding of how products, orders, and shipments work together.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "shipping rates imported via a .csv file are always entered at a website view level"
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Origin tab we need to enter the details of our company's warehouse".
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