Fast shipping setup for New Zealand WooCommerce stores

Setting up shipping for New Zealand WooCommerce stores can be a hassle. New Zealand has two separate island and is sparsely populated. So shipping between major cities can be cheap, but shipping to a remote rural address or off shore island can be expensive.

Fortunately WooCommerce can handle shipping fairly well. This tutorial will be using ‘out of the box’ WooCommerce. If you need more complex shipping rules I’d recommend using a Table Shipping plugin. Or if you use NZ Post to send parcels there is a great NZ Post plugin available that will calculate shipping based on NZ Post’s prices.

Adding the shipping zones

First go to WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping. Then Add a Shipping Zone.

I’m going to use Auckland as a base city. But you can use whatever city you like.

Create a zone and call it ‘Auckland’.

Then in the Zone regions box start typing Auckland. It has all the New Zealand regions so Auckland will appear.

Then create a shipping method. This is where we define the price. I’m going to make this a Free shipping zone.

Bear in mind by Auckland WooCommerce means Auckland region. So at the moment even rural Auckland addresses will be free. But we will fix this shortly.

The next zone we will set up is the rest of the North Island.

Create another zone and call it ‘North Island’. For the Zone regions we will add all the North Island regions apart from Auckland.

Then we will create a Flat rate shipping method of $15

Next we will create a similar zone for the South Island. Do it the same as the North Island and give it a Shipping method. I’ve given it the price of $20.

Now we can take care of the rural areas. Create another Shipping zone and call it North Island Rural.

Make the Zone region ‘New Zealand’. It doesn’t matter that it’s all of NZ because we will add specific postcodes.

Copy and paste the contents of NZ Rural postcodes Nth Island.txt into the postcodes box and save the shipping zone.

Do the same for the South Island. Make a shipping zone called South Island Rural, make the zone region New Zealand and paste the contents of NZ Rural Sth Island postcodes.txt into it.

Now we have all our shipping zones set up. Make sure they are ordered like the image below. WooCommerce will apply the shipping zone rules in order. So if anyone types in a rural postcode that will override the regions below.

For instance, if the address is New Plymouth then the $15 North Island flat rate will apply. If the address is rural Taranaki then the $20 NZ Nth Island Rural flat rate will apply.

Of course you can make the base city and the shipping costs charged whatever you like. And WooCommerce has many more shipping tools that can help in charging the correct amounts of heavy or large packages.

This is the easiest and fastest way to set up a simple shipping rate structure for New Zealand WooCommerce stores.

(Right click and save as to download)

Download the North Island Postcodes here

Download the South Island Postcodes here

If you are looking for specific New Zealand Postcodes you can find a full list of postcodes from the NZ Post website here.