How do shipping classes work in WC - APG Weight Shipping?

The other day we published version 1.6 of the WC - APG Weight Shipping plugin; in it, besides having changed the way shipping costs are calculated, since we have created a new rate calculation engine, what concerns us today is its new feature: support for shipping classes.

For those of you who do not yet know what shipping classes are, shipping classes are classes that allow us to group similar products together so as to be able to apply some particular rule to them afterwards through the shipping class that groups them, for example, a particular VAT rate.

In the particular case of WC - APG Weight Shipping it allows us to do the same, although taking it a little further, since in the creation of the groups themselves we have the possibility of configuring the VAT rate that is going to affect them, and therefore the shipping classes we select.

So, we are going to see how they work and what we can do with them.

We are going to see it clearly with a real example from one of our clients. Let us imagine that we have two classes of products, some to which we want to apply a particular shipping cost and others which we do not want to charge any kind of shipping cost for. Many of you will answer that Flat rate shipping (the flat_rate class) already exists in WooCommerce for that, and so it does, but what if, on top of that, we want our products not to be purchasable in Ceuta, Melilla, the Canary Islands or the Balearic Islands? Then Flat rate is no longer useful to us, since it does not discriminate between shipping zones, and we do not even want to imagine it if we want to apply different rates to it depending on the weight.

Well then, thanks to the new feature, just as we can see in the screenshot, we will be able to create two groups for the country Spain, and apply to each one the shipping class we want, as well as creating a group of provinces or states where we will put the provinces we do not want to sell to, with the All available shipping classes option selected, in order to add that group in the No shipping field, which will make the purchase impossible for the residents of those provinces.

Now all that would be left for us would be to create the rates we need, just as was explained at the time in How is WC - APG Weight Shipping configured?.

And how will the calculation be done then?

Well, the plugin will take from the order all the products that belong to the Standard shipping class and will add up their total weight, and will apply the rate corresponding to that weight, and will add VAT to that rate, so that we will have a partial total for all those products.

On the other hand it will take from the order all the products that belong to the Free shipping class, and will not apply any rate to it, since we have configured it at zero, but let us imagine that it has a series of rates configured: well, WC - APG Weight Shipping will do the same as with the previous shipping class, obtaining a second partial total for those products.

Finally both partial totals will be added together, giving us a shipping cost total to which the corresponding Cost per order and/or Additional cost will be applied, if they have been configured, obtaining in this way the total shipping cost that will be applied to the order.

Thanks to the new calculation engine we can configure as many VAT rates as we need, since they will be applied and added individually to the partial totals, all of them being sent to the WooCommerce engine in charge of calculating the final shipping cost. In addition, we can use for one and the same zone all the shipping classes we need, individually or collectively, and we can have more than one shipping class applied in a single group.

With this we can raise the complexity of the calculations to the maximum possible, so, in the event that we are going to use this feature, it is necessary for us to fine-tune the rates as much as possible, since we can get unpleasant surprises with shipping costs that are too high.

For example, if we sell products that weigh a few grams, we create a couple of groups with two different shipping classes and the first rate we apply is for the first kilo and the second for the second kilo, we can find that the total weight of the order, after adding up the partial weights of both shipping classes, is less than a kilo, and that the resulting shipping cost is the equivalent of the rate configured for two kilos, for example, since the system will apply the most appropriate rate for each partial weight, in this case the one configured for one kilo, even though the partial weight was barely a few grams.

That is why it is more necessary than ever to take the utmost care with the configuration of WC - APG Weight Shipping if we do not want to get unpleasant surprises.