What If You Still Need to Use Table Rates on Magento for Your E-commerce?

Imagine you own an online furniture store with products of different sizes, and the frequency of orders varies a lot from customer to customer. Let's compare these two scenarios: on the one hand, you have a customer who orders small products at your shop infrequently. On the other hand, you have a customer who has bigger orders and orders frequently. Now, if you offer flat rate shipping these two customers could end up with the same shipping costs, which is pretty unfair and also doesn't make any sense to you or them. Why would these two customers pay the same for completely different orders?

Here is the advantage of shipping with Table Rates, you can easily offer customized shipping rates depending on shipping scenarios. Why? Because Table Rates are specially tailored for your E-commerce, and you are free to set them the way it suits you. Flat rates are simple to use and are usually the easy way out, but they are not as flexible and can not be perfected to your E-commerce.

Naturally, calculating Table Rates can be time-consuming but using flat rates you will end up spending too much money on the shipping itself. Plus, Table Rates can be fully automated which saves a lot of time.

What Is a Table Rate Shipping? Table Rates allow you to create complex shipping rules and methods to ship products to various customers in different countries, for the least amount possible. You can define Table Rates based on any condition such as geographic location, product weight, size, or quantity. It is like configuring shipping rules within a single table.

Table Rates allow you to configure the most accurate condition-based shipping rates even on individual products, product groups, or cart levels — that what does table rates mean in shipping.

Table Rates shipping is based on a combination of conditions, including:

Geographical conditions - shipping area, country, region or state, city, postal codes, and even address line.

Cart and Product conditions - price, subtotal, weight, range, quantity, category, or any other product attribute from your Magento.

Feel free to select where to apply rate conditions either to Entire Cart, Individual Products, or Grouped Products.

The best time to implement Table Rates shipping is if your online E-commerce is within one of the following categories: strong geographical dependence, product diversity, low shipping budget. Have a look at the list below for further information.

The advantages of Magento Table Rates shipping are information clarity, CSV import and export, multiple calculation algorithms, multiple shipping methods, and multi-conditioning, flexible calculation algorithm. Have a look at the detailed explanation of each one of them below.

Magento 2 shipping table rates are not as flexible in the terms of calculation algorithms. Plus, they are missing additional features such as Shipping Rules, Volumetric Weight, and Delivery Dates which are built-in Calcurates.

Calcurates offers Table Rate Shipping also in combination with other shipping features. Calcurates uses API connection only, which means there will be no other conflicts with other Magento extensions you might have installed in the past. Each shipping method can be configured to work with various conditions such as shipping zones, other geo attributes, product weight, quantity, or price ranges.

There are other e-commerce platforms that offer Table Rate Shipping like Mageplaza.