A destination zone, or a delivery zone, is a geographical area that you ship to. With the help of zones you can define where you sell and how much you charge for delivering orders to various customer locations. For example, you can offer free shipping in your local area and paid shipping to other places, or you may want to sell to customers within your city only. Besides, you can use zones to set different tax rates for different areas if you set up taxes manually in your store.

A zone can be a single region, a group of several countries, or an area limited by zip codes or a delivery radius.

Creating a destination zone

When you set up shipping options in your store, they get assigned to the All Destinations zone by default which means that customers from any location in the world can choose such shipping options and place an order.

To offer a shipping option to a certain area only, you can restrict that shipping option to that destination area. For this, you can define a zone on map (it’s usually used for a local delivery) or go advanced and select a region/country/states from the lists or even limit a zone by zip codes.

Using zone on map

To create a zone on map (for delivery):

From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup and click on the shipping method you want to create a zone for.
Scroll to the Delivery zone block.
Select Zone on map and click Create zone.
You will see a polygon on the map. Use the drag handles of polygon to resize the zone you deliver to with this shipping or delivery method. Example:

If you’ve specified an address as your Shipping Origin in the Shipping & Pickup page, that address will be pinned on the map. Right-click on the created polygon to see how far you deliver in kilometres.

Tip: In case you have the same delivery rate for different locations, click +Add new zone on the map and use additional polygon to define another area for your shipping option. You can add up to 20 polygons per zone.

5. Click Save and Finish.

To charge different rates for various customer locations, you can create additional delivery methods with other rates and set up other delivery zones for them.

Using countries, states, zip codes (advanced settings)

To create a zone for a delivery method or a tax rate by using country, states and zip/postal codes:

From your store admin, either go to Shipping & Pickup and click on any shipping method, or go to Settings → Taxes and click Manage Tax Rates.
Click Manage zones.
Click Add New Zone.
Click Add Country to restrict the zone to a specific country, select this country from the list and click Add countries to confirm your choice. Or click Add Region to quickly select all countries that belong to a certain region like North America, European Union or Africa.

5. Click Add State to restrict the zone to a specific state in the country, select this state from the list and click Add States to confirm your choice. If you are going to ship to all states within the selected country, leave the State list empty.

Note: If you add states to the zone that already includes several different countries, you should add states for all these countries.

6. Fill out the Zip/Postal codes field to restrict the zone to certain locations within the state, e.g. cities, towns and streets.

You can use wildcard symbols to build the list of zip/postal codes:

“?” matches any single character
“*” matches any number of characters, including zero. Spaces will be ignored.
“_” matches any number of spaces (at least one)
“^” excludes certain zip codes (e.g. ^432011 - only the zip code 432011 is excluded; ^432* - all zip codes that start with 432 are excluded)

7. Click Save.

Repeat the above steps to create other zones if you offer different shipping rates for different countries, states, etc.

When at checkout a customer enters an address that is within a zone, they see all your shipping options available for that zone and can choose how they want you to ship their order. Otherwise, if a customer’s address doesn’t fit any of your zones, they see the Sorry, we don't ship to this location message and can’t place any order in your store.

Changing delivery zone for a shipping option

You may need to assign another zone to a shipping option or add/remove an area from a zone that you ship to.

To update a delivery zone for a shipping option:

From your store admin, go to Shipping & Pickup and click on the shipping method you need to change a zone for.
Scroll to the Delivery zone block.
Depending on how you’ve set up the zone:

If you use delivery radius, under Zone on map click Edit Zone and shape the polygon as necessary using drag handles. To remove some addresses from the delivery, instead of a single common zone you can add several zones in the desired places on the map.

If you use country/states/zip codes to form a zone, under Advanced settings choose another zone from the drop-down or click Create new zone if you don’t have the zone you need in your store yet and then choose the newly created zone from the drop-down.

To update the zone itself, for example add or remove an area from it, click Manage zone, click on the zone name on the lefthand and make the necessary adjustments. Note that the changes will apply globally, i.e. if you have other shipping options assigned to this zone, your zone updates will apply to those shipping options, too.

Setting up destination zones for the UK

Since there is no standard and finalized list of the UK counties that should be used in online stores, it is advisable to calculate a shipping rate for the UK based only on a Country name and a Postal code.

At checkout when the UK is selected as a “Ship to” country, the State (County) is displayed as a text field, not a drop-down list that requires selection. Customers have to input their county name to the State (County) field. If you calculate shipping rates based on County and your customer mistypes at checkout, they will see a warning that there is no shipping to this location till they enter the county name correctly.

To minimize the negative effect of such mistypes at checkout, we recommend you to leave the list of States(Counties) in the UK Zone settings empty and use the postal codes for restricting the delivery zones.

Here is a sample zone setup for shipping to all areas across the UK:

If you need to offer different rates for different areas in the UK, you can restrict the zones by postal codes, so that the shipping rate applies to the addresses that are covered by these postal codes.