The Merchant Dashboard is the interface you will use to list your products, view your sales and analytics, manage your account information and subscriptions, and more! The Dashboard is designed for ease-of-use, but should you need any clarifications then resources such as this Handbook, the chat bubble on the bottom right of your browser, and our Contact Us page are available to you.
Shipping Set-Up: Shipping Zones #
After navigating to the “Shipping” tab from the Merchant Dashboard menu, you will be presented with the “Shipping Settings” screen. At the very top of this screen will be a button that reads “Click Here to Add Shipping Policies”. Be sure you have a shipping policy created, as it is a legal matter. The creation of such a policy is something [dephoro] cannot advise you on, but there is plenty of reliable reference material available on the internet. When you have your Shipping Policy drafted, navigate back to the Shipping Settings screen.
This “Shipping Settings” displays a list of shipping zones (geographical regions). You can choose to activate any or all of the zones, depending on your store’s needs. To activate a zone, hit the “Edit” link that appears on mouse-over below the zone’s name (depicted below). The zone will become active once the proper settings for it have been filled out, and the “Edit” link will take you to those settings.
To clarify what zones do, suppose we fully set up (activated) the United States zone, the North America zone, and the Global Zone. [dephoro] was founded in Colorado, located in the United States, so it would make sense for our store to set the United States as our primary zone which will take precedent over all others. Shipping costs within the United States should be significantly less than shipping costs to destinations outside of the United States. So by activating the United States zone, we can filter out all of the United States supporters into one rate class.
Now suppose someone from Canada ordered something from the [dephoro] store. Canada is really close to the United States, just like Mexico, so shipping costs to these locations would probably be more than the United States zone costs, but they’ll be cheaper than shipping to Russia. So for Canada, we would activate the North American zone, and price it accordingly.
Finally, our Global zone will handle any orders not covered by the other two methods (which covered the entirety of North America). So the person from Russia, who we mentioned before, would be charged the rate determined by this Global zone when we activate it.
You can safely activate as many zones as your store may need. There is no limit, and we can add new zones for you upon request. But do be aware that each of these zones must be set up separately, and the process can be quite tedious depending on how technical your demands are.
