Any business has to be well-organized and optimized for the conditions you have in a particular situation or the moment of time. This means that you have to control every single aspect of your eCommerce project to achieve success and reach your goals. One of such aspects is, of course, shipping, because online stores cannot work without this service. You must have various options for delivering your goods to customers, no matter where they are. The problem is that the standard Magento setup doesn’t provide enough flexibility to control these methods and choose the best ones that suit the current situation. This leads to misunderstandings and different confusions, which is not good for business. If you want to be a reputable seller who offers only the best for its clients, you must take care of your shipping-related issues. How should you do this?
In order not to search for the answer for too long or waste a tremendous amount of money on specialists, you can just install a simple but yet extremely effective add-on designed by Mirasvit. This plugin has everything you need to create a good shipping policy and increase the productivity of your shop. And here is how it works.
Features
Offer only what the customer needs
You may quickly modify shipping parameters to meet current conditions based on your type of business and goals. You may pick and choose which delivery methods to make accessible to your clients so that they only get what they need. As a result, you will aid in the optimization of goods delivery to consumers, increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. Don’t provide alternatives that aren’t relevant, and make the buying experience more pleasurable and clear.
Customers should be shown available ways based on the following criteria:
- Attributes of ordered items
- Cart attributes
- Date and time stamps
Choose the most suitable method for distant locations
Regarding online stores, you never know where you have to deliver your products, which means you have to be ready for anything. Therefore, it’s better to choose the most cost-efficient and high-quality delivery methods for even the farthest regions. With this add-on, you are able to control shipping options for any customer location, creating special regions with the help of restrictions.
You can restrict shipping methods, according to the following shipping parameters:
- Country
- State or province
- Region
- Postcode
For example, if you usually deliver to distant locations but a new order is made from a city nearby, you can ban particular methods that are not optimal in this situation so that the customer will never choose it mistakenly or on purpose.
In addition to this, it’s possible to use payment methods as restriction criteria. Or you can even make some options unavailable for goods that cannot last for too long without proper conditions. For example, this may be flowers or food that won’t last a few days, which means it’s better to forbid any delivery method that takes more than one day.
Combine conditions to suit the situation even better
Don’t use one condition — combine them, according to the attributes of the cart and the order itself, to achieve more flexible conditions. This is literally the best way to choose the most optimal restriction bundle for a certain situation. Look at the possible combinations available with this plugin:
- Attributes of chosen products
- Product subselection
- Attributes of the shopping cart
- All the options in one
Thus, you can block shipping of some goods because there are no possibilities to deliver them. If purchased goods are too heavy and have to be delivered with the help of a truck, but there is no single road for such a truck in the region, there would be no such option to apply.
Base your shipping methods on the product attributes to offer the best variant automatically
When a client purchases an item in your online store, the most appropriate shipping choices are chosen based on the attributes of the purchased items. These characteristics, in other words, can be utilized as blocking triggers for specific delivery methods.
If a chosen item is delicate, or excessively expensive and complex, for example, the add-on can automatically disallow dangerous, poorly protected choices for such products. This makes managing shipments a lot easier.
Magento shipping restrictions per item is an outstanding feature of this module that helps you always meet all local and international shipping laws. A strong international shipping policy is an important element of running an online business. There are several examples of international export/import and transportation limitations and rules, therefore it’s a good idea to just provide qualified choices for acquired items. Hazardous and harmful materials, for example, cannot be carried internationally without specific packaging or simply cannot be transported at all, limiting the variety of shipping options.
Product characteristics are easy to use and efficient since they always lead to the most convenient and appropriate alternatives.
With a nearly completely customized strategy, limit the availability of shipping methods
Select store views where regulations will be applied for more precise management. Also, you can choose particular customer groups to apply restrictions.
Create limits for a certain carrier as a whole or for any of the suggested carriers based on shipping methods. For each defined limitation, you can specify several carriers and their methods.
There are no secrets
Don’t make your customers think like you want to hide something from them or trick them. Supply people with the reasons for restrictions applied. Create a special message that will describe an issue. This will help customers understand why some options are blocked and how to unblock them, which stimulates users to buy and increases your trustworthiness. If you don’t want to provide any additional information, you can just leave the message field empty.
Create schedules for limits
Create rules for automatic activation for any of your restrictions. Specify the exact day and time of activation and set one or multiple days for each rule. This helps you meet your current business necessities more accurately. Moreover, it’s possible to combine this automation with other conditions for even better results.
Facilitate the entire process
Do not set rules for each region separately! In order to save plenty of time, you can combine different shipping zones with the same conditions into one. You can add new regions or remove them whenever you want.
The Shipping Area parameter will help you create limits because it has a number of handy templates. To make each delivery zone more comprehensive, add countries, cities, postcodes, and so on. Distant regions can be configured individually.
Utilize payment methods as restriction criteria as well
Control which delivery options are accessible for different payment types and use the shipping methods your shop provides for marketing purposes.
You may promote a certain payment method via cell phones, for example, by giving a special delivery method to customers who use it.
Alternatively, certain payment methods may not be appropriate for international delivery, or your business may provide shipping options that are best suited to local transactions.
Conclusion
With shipping restrictions, Magento-based websites become more flexible and adjustable, which is quite important in today’s world. It’s hard to monitor and control everything on your own, especially if you don’t have special skills and possibilities. You might not know before how cool and convenient it is to have shipping regulations in your online store. However, now you can see the real benefits of this. And we believe that you realize how simple it is to use this small, inexpensive, and high-quality plugin. Save your time, money, and energy — click on a few buttons and create the most efficient and well-developed strategy for delivering products. This will not only help you make more money but also open many new possibilities. Give your customers what they want and what they need to become a market leader. If you want this, then Mirasvit’s modules are for you.
