It is now possible to group countries or states together into zones, making it easier to assign delivery services for them.
When a buyer goes through checkout and enters their address, it will lookup their country / state to see which zone they fit into and will then display the delivery services which have been set up for that zone.
To set this up:
1. Set up your zones via Delivery Zone Manager, into which you will then add countries/states
Via Despatch & Delivery Manager:
2. Go into each Delivery Region (i.e. country/state) and tick which zone(s) it fits into
3. Go into Delivery Services and set up each delivery service and the zones it applies to
Setting Delivery Services For Specific Product Types
This allows you to go to an extra level of control over which delivery service is shown, based on a product type.
This uses Checkout Buying Rules so that only specified delivery services are shown for a product when it is being purchased.
Example
This example looks at the shipment of flammable products. DHL allows it by road to some countries or air to others. Royal Mail doesn't ship flammable products at all.
DHL allow flammable products to be transported using its Road Service to a certain set of countries within the EU, or internationally by Air Freight Service to another set of countries. On the other hand, Royal Mail's delivery services do NOT allow flammable products to be transported at all. So you would only want to show DHL delivery for flammable products at checkout stage (either by road or air dependent upon country) whereas DHL and Royal Mail can both be displayed for non-flammable products.
Set up two zones, one for countries accessible by road, the other for countries accessible by air.
Set up a delivery service for Road, ticking the zone for road-accessible countries, and one for air-accessible countries, ticking the zone for air freight.
For each flammable product, add a buying rule and select which delivery services are allowed for that product, plus there is an extra override for countries, in case you want to further narrow down which countries are allowed.
When the buyer goes through checkout and buys a flammable product they will then only see the DHL Road Service if their country fits within that zone, or the Air Freight Service, if their country fits within that zone.