Shipping

The shipping module of the plugin has been designed to be as customizable as possible to be able to serve most of the needs of a typical gift registry or wishlist store.

With this module, the admin can make the wishlist’s shipping address required, calculate shipping for wishlist items separately from that of non-wishlist items, set up shipping methods that should be available for the wishlist items in the cart, ship wishlist items to the wishlist’s owner’s address, and modify the display of the wishlist’s owner’s address on the frontend.

Enable shipping

The shipping module can be toggled on and off depending on the needs of the woocommece store. If the plugin is set to be used as a wishlist using the wishlist type setting, the shipping module would be automatically disabled. But it can be enabled by simply checking the chekbox. If the module is disabled, all plugin operations related to shipping would be prevented.

Make shipping address required

The admin has the ability to make the shipping address required for all wishlists which are created. If a wishlist is created by a user without a shipping address, the user would be prevented from adding items to the wishlist until he has filled in his shipping address. Even if the wishlist has a shipping address but some of the required shipping fields have not been filled, the user would be prevented from adding items to the wishlist until all the required fields have been filled.

If the admin sets items to be shipping to the wishlist owner’s address, the checkbox to make shipping address required would be automatically checked so that any wishlist in checkout would have a shipping address.

Please note that the options below are only for the full version of the plugin.

Calculate shipping separately for wishlist items

By default, wishlist items are treated as normal items in the cart and shipping is calculated for them together with the other items using the address of the person buying the items if provided. This setting allows the cart to be split into various packages and puts the wishlist items into separate packages thus allowing shipping to be calculated for them based on the shipping address of the wishlist’s owner.

Select shipping methods for wishlist items

The plugin also allows you to set the shipping methods that should only be available for wishlist items. As usual the cart treats wishlist items the same a normal items so it makes the same shipping methods available to all of them. If however you want the wishlist items in the cart to have separate shipping methods you would select the shipping methods here. The shipping methods not selected would be excluded from the frontend and only those selected would be available for selection for the wishlist items in the frontend.

For example, if you want all wishlist items in the cart to be free shipping, you should select only free shipping from the options. This would prevent the person buying the wishlist items from being charged shipping costs for them.

Note that the shipping methods available here are those which have been registered in the admin area for woocommerce. So out of the box, the plugin would typically show the default woocommerce shipping methods such as free shipping, local pickup and flat rate. If any plugins have registered additional shipping methods in the admin area, they would also be shown. Some shipping methods, however, may be added dynamically much later in the order process and since the plugin cannot tell what these are, they would not be shown here.

Another thing to be sure of is that apart from being registered in the woocommerce admin area, any shipping methods selected should also be activated or enabled for it to actually work. So for example, if you want customers to be able to select only local pickup and free shipping for wishlist items in the frontend, these methods should also be enabled in the woocommerce admin area as shown in the screenshot below.

Ship items to the wishlist’s owner’s address

The plugin offers the ability to ship all cart items to the wishlist’s owner’s address. If this setting is enabled, the main shipping address on the cart and checkout pages and for the order would be set to the wishlist’s owners address. These means that if there are non-wishlist items in the cart, they would also be shipped to the wishlist’s owner’s address. When this setting is checked, the purchaser of the items would not be able to change the shipping address on the cart or checkout pages.

Note that it is also possible to ship wishlist items to the wishlist’s owner’s address without necessarily setting the main shipping address to that of the wishlist owner. Simply check the setting that allows you to calculate shipping for wishlist items separate from normal items. In a situation where the store manager wants guests to be able to buy items for themselves which ship to their own address, and in the same cart buy items for the wishlist owner, which ship to the wishlist’s owner’s address, this is what should be done.

Hide wishlist’s owner’s shipping address fields

Sometimes store manages want privacy for wishlist owners. You don’t necessary want to display the full details of the wishlist’s owner’s shipping address on the frontend. The visibility of every single shipping address field of the wishlist owner can be toggled using the plugin. This allows the store manager to display the wishlist’s owner’s shipping address the way he wants on the frontend, or even hide it completely.

Note that this only applies to the frontend, for easy management of orders, the wishlist’s owner’s address field is not hidden in the backend.

Replace wishlist’s owner’s shipping address fields

Instead of hiding all or parts of the wishlist’s owner’s address fields on the frontend, the plugin allows the store owner to completely replace the text generated for these fields with something customized and bespoke. It makes available to other information from the wishlist’s owner’s profile for use in generating the custom shipping address text that would be displayed to the guests buying for the wishlist on the frontend.

Note on plugin conflicts:

The shipping module of the plugin is one of the complex aspects of the plugin. As such in some rare cases there may be conflicts with other plugins that modify woocommerce’s shipping functionality. You may need to watch out for this especially when activating the pro version for the first time. However the ability to toggle different shipping settings in the plugin is designed to minimise this.