Local Pickup doesn’t work

Hey @dmwc! It sounds like the Shipping Zone order/priority might be the problem here. On the WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping zones page, all of the zones can be re-ordered by clicking and dragging. This is important because only the Shipping Methods in the first zone that matches will be offered.

For example, if you have a “Europe” zone at the very top, that zone will match and offer the methods in that zone to the customer- all zones below that one will be ignored. Ideally, since you want to offer Local Pickup to any customer in the Netherlands or Germany, make sure that no other Shipping Zones have those 2 countries in them and also feel free to add any other shipping methods you want to offer for those countries to the same zone that Local Pickup is in. If the other methods are different between Germany and the Netherlands, just make each country have it’s own shipping zone and add the applicable methods to each one.

Just keep in mind that only one Shipping Zone will be matched/used, but you can add as many Shipping Methods to each zone that you want. Also, if you go to WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping options, you can enable “Debug” and it will tell you what shipping zone matches when you do tests on the Cart/Checkout pages.

Thanks Shaun,

I actually tried reordering the shipping zones and it makes sense that that didn’t work what I did.

But at first I tried the following (and re-did that now):

1. Adding “Local Pickup” to the Shipping Zone Netherlands and Germany.
2. Make sure that no other shipping zone “overrules” this zone.

In my test account the option is not shown in the checkout.

If reorder the shipping methods from:

Flat Rate
Free Shipping from 80€
Local Pickup

to

Local Pickup
Flat Rate
Free Shipping from 80€

… the checkout shows the Local Pickup method, but I only this. There is no option to choose Flat Rate.

I enabled Debug but nothing is shown after that: where do I find a log of that? It’s not under Status->Logs.

Again thanks for you help!
Dirk

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by dmwc.

Hey Dirk,

The order of the Shipping Methods within the Shipping Zone should only affect the order they are shown on the Cart/Checkout pages- it shouldn’t have any effect on preventing other methods below that point from being offered (that is only true for Shipping Zones, as there can only be a single zone matched/used).

Enabling Shipping Debug only displays the zone that was matched and helps prevent cached shipping rates from being offered. It doesn’t create a troubleshooting log for you to view, unfortunately.

If Flat Rate isn’t showing, I would first make sure that there are rates set up for that product/Shipping Class in that zone. A good way to guarantee that Flat Rate is offered is using the “Cost” field at the top of the settings, as that is the base cost for everything (and any costs below, like for individual Shipping Classes, would be added to that base cost).

If that doesn’t help, there could be a plugin preventing shipping methods from showing, so I would test again (ideally on a staging site) with just WooCommerce active- if you don’t have an idea of what (usually) shipping-related plugin might cause this issue.

Hi Shaun,

I found the problem. If I change the tax status from taxable to none, it works!

Thanks
Dirk

But, another question. If the webshop knows that I am located in the Netherlands a message appears: Customer matched zone “NL”. This doesn’t make sense for me because this irritates our customers. But, we could use this function to tell the customers that local pick up is possible. How can I edit this function?

Many thanks!
Dirk

Hey Dirk,

That message is displayed when “Debug mode” is enabled on the WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping > Shipping options page and is generally only used for troubleshooting purposes. Depending on how you want to let your customers know about Local Pickup options, it might be better to use the “Store Notice” on the Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce > Store Notice page (like this example from my test site) or a message plugin (cart notices, pop-ups, etc).

If you do end up trying to use the Shipping Debug message to let customers know about Local Pickup, keep in mind that the “Default customer location” setting on the WooCommerce > Settings > General page is used until the customer enters a specific address on the Cart or Checkout.

Got it, many thanks!