Set Up Shipping Areas and Rates with Square Online
If you’re selling physical items in your store, you’ll need to decide which locations you will ship to and how much to charge. There are several different shipping options to choose from depending on what your needs are.
To get started with shipping:
Go to your Online Overview page.
Select Settings > Shipping.
Confirm the Shipping from address. This address is used to determine the shipping rates and carriers (USPS, FedEx, etc.) available in your location. If you’re shipping from a different location, click Edit Address and Save your changes.
Add Shipping Regions
The shipping region is automatically added based on your shipping address. You can set up additional regions if you are shipping to additional countries. To add a shipping region:
Go to your Online Overview page
Select Settings > Shipping.
Click Add Region.
Start typing to search for a specific location or select one from the drop-down list.
You can Select States (or provinces/countries) to exclude specific areas. For example, if you will not be shipping to Hawaii, you can uncheck it from the list.
Tip: Add shipping exclusions and other information to the Store Policies in Settings > Checkout.
Calculate Shipping Charges
You’ll need to decide how you want to calculate shipping charges.
Go to your Online Overview page
Select Settings > Shipping.
Select a shipping region.
Click Show Additional Shipping Rates to display additional options.
Shipping Options
Which one should you choose? It depends on what you’re shipping. Here’s a quick overview of the options.
Note: Digital and Service type items do not count toward order price, weight, or quantity.
Calculates shipping based on weight and destination at checkout through carriers such as USPS, FedEx, etc.. This is a good option if you want to make sure your customers always get the most accurate shipping rates without being over or under-charged. For more details, check out our full article on Real Time Shipping.
Set a single price for shipping and charge either per order or per item. This is a good choice if you want to keep things simple and know that your shipping costs don’t vary much.
Offer free shipping based on order weight, order price, or for all orders. Use this in conjunction with other rates to give your customers a deal on larger purchases (for example, “Free shipping on all orders over $50!”).
Set your own rates based on the weight of all items in an order. This can work well when you ship within a limited area. This option will not take into account the distance to the destination or what carriers actually charge. You’ll need to make sure that you’ve specified a weight for each of your items.
Shipping Example
For our example, we’ll use weight based shipping, though the setup process is similar for all of the manual shipping types. Before you start adding rates for weight based shipping, you’ll need to make sure that you’ve specified a weight for each of your items.
Give the shipping rate a name.
Enter the price and weight ranges. You can add more rows with the Add Rule button, or remove one using the delete icon to the right of each rate.
Add a fallback rate so you won’t end up paying out of pocket if a customer’s order happens to fall outside of the weight ranges you’ve entered.
Click Done at the top to save your changes.
Add additional rates for this region if needed.
Click Save to return to the main Shipping setup page.
Add Region to enter another shipping destination and rates for that location, or click Edit to modify or delete existing rates and regions.