How to ship orders when selling on WooCommerce

Woocommerce has become the go-to e-commerce platform for retailers with a website built on Wordpress. Easy to set up and free to use, Woocommerce is suited to businesses small and large and can provide an elegant shopping experience for your customers.

What can be harder to establish is a seamless shipping solution for sellers on the platform. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the options available and see how they compare to one another.

CSV Export

So, you’ve set up your Woocommerce store and courier accounts and now you need to get your orders from one to the other. One way to do this that doesn’t involve the installation of any third party software is to export a CSV file directly from your Woocommerce store and import it into your courier account.

Then, once you create shipments on these orders you can export and import a CSV file in the opposite direction back into Woocommerce to update your orders with tracking information. Then you can mark the orders as dispatched in Woocommerce and repeat the same process each day.

This is both the cheapest and most time-consuming method and probably best suited to sellers who don’t necessarily need to ship orders every single day. Like any manual process, there is room here for human error amidst the day’s importing and exporting. If you’re only using one courier and aren’t selling on any other platforms this could be a tenable solution for you but for most sellers, a small investment in some automation will probably save them a lot of time and hassle.

Woocomerce Plugins

If you have a higher volume of orders coming in it would probably be worth browsing the Woocommerce app store for extensions to integrate your couriers directly with your store. Many major couriers have Woocommerce extensions for sale. These allow you to create shipments on your orders and can be a decent solution for sellers who only sell on Woocommerce. It’s worth noting that a lot of these extensions, though they look like they have been built by the courier itself, have actually been developed by third parties.

Make sure you research any extension thoroughly before committing to one and if possible, read reviews from other sellers. Though each extension can cost under £100 there is no point buying one unless it is continuously supported and responds to updates on Woocommerce. Wherever possible it would be advisable to trial each extension before paying.

Shipping Management Platforms

If you don’t only sell on Woocommerce or use a number of different couriers you’re probably ready to start tying everything together with a Shipping Management platform. These provide a one-stop-shop where you can print shipping labels and dispatch orders. You’ll see your orders automatically import from all of your sales channels and you can ship them using any of your integrated couriers like DPD or APC Overnight. This can be a much less hectic environment to work in than visiting several different sites every day. What’s more, you’re likely to find a higher quality of support here than in a Woocommerce extension.

Trying to find the Shipping Management platform that suits you best can be a bit of a minefield but read reviews from other sellers who fit your profile and try to avoid platforms that attempt to do too many things.

If you're looking for a clean, easy to use interface that streamlines your daily shipping workflow, then Zenstores is more than likely going to be your best option.

That's because shipping software like Zenstores first and foremost helps save you time day-to-day shipping orders, uploading tracking data and communicating this with your customers. Whilst, Zenstores will also ensure you have a reliable foundation to scale your business with, so you won't have to revisit this blog post when things start to heat up!

Final thoughts

If you’re looking to enhance your shipping experience for Woocommerce there are a number of different routes you can go down each with their own price tag. 

The important thing to consider when sizing up these options is how much time you would save by implementing them and how much extra income your business would generate as a consequence. With some careful attention to detail, before long you should be working less and earning more!