Set up USPS Shipping without Box Packing or Label Printing

Hi @cschonhaut!

In summary:

We want to ship with USPS
We don’t want to have to add any product measurements or weights
We want to handle label printing and box packing manually, outside WordPress

I think there might be some confusion with how WooCommerce shipping (lowercase s) and WooCommerce Shipping and Tax (uppercase S) work.

WooCommerce Shipping and Tax is a stand-alone plugin that is an extension for WooCommerce. It is designed to work with WooCommerce and USPS for label-printing purposes. You don’t need to use this plugin unless you want label-printing, and, when you do, you only pay for the labels you actually print. This is a manual process, so you wouldn’t be automatically charged for a label whenever a customer ordered something. From what you described of your desired setup, I don’t think you need WooCommerce Shipping and Tax at all.

In the core WooCommerce plugin, you can set up shipping zones and add shipping methods. There are several built-in shipping methods you can use, including flat rate shipping. It sounds like the core functionality would serve your shipping needs perfectly ??

Our documentation on this is here if you’d like some more information.

Does that make sense? Let me know if I can clarify anything further!

Hi Austin – thank you so much for explaining this, it helps alot!!
My only follow-up question would be in regards to taxation… how would you recommend that tax gets added to all products if I don’t use WooCommerce Shipping & Tax? Is there a built-in tool for this, or a different plugin you would suggest?

Thank you!!!

Hi @cschonhaut! You’re welcome, I’m glad I could answer your shipping questions!

how would you recommend that tax gets added to all products if I don’t use WooCommerce Shipping & Tax? Is there a built-in tool for this, or a different plugin you would suggest?

There is built-in tax functionality, yes. You can manually add tax rates that will apply to specific geographic regions, which can be as broad as countries and as specific as individual zip codes. You can also add different tax classes if you want different products to be taxed differently. You can read more about our built-in tax functionality here.

I misspoke slightly when I said you didn’t need WooCommerce Shipping and Tax. What I should have said was that you don’t need WooCommerce Shipping and Tax for shipping. It still might make sense for you to use just the automated tax calculation part of the plugin (although you certainly don’t need to), and you can do that without ever touching the shipping aspect of the plugin. The advantage of automated taxes is that you don’t need to set the rates yourself, as they are calculated automatically for you. You can read about that here.

Just a note as you’re looking into the Shipping and Tax automated tax calculation: the plugin assumes you only have one tax nexus, which is defined as being in the state listed in your store address in your WooCommerce general settings (WooCommerce > Settings > General). Sales tax will then only be charged for customers who have a shipping address in that state. No out-of-state purchases will be charged sales tax.

If you would like to charge automated sales tax for out of state purchases, you’d need to use a more powerful tax plugin that allows you to set multiple nexuses. You can see our other tax plugins here. The ones you’d want to look at here are TaxJar and Avalara, which are free to download, but, unlike WooCommerce Shipping and Tax, require a paid subscription to an external tax service.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Hi @cschonhaut,

It’s been a while since we heard from you, so I’m marking this thread resolved. Hopefully, you’ve been able to resolve this, but if you haven’t, please let open up a new topic and we’ll be happy to help out.

Thanks!

Hi Austin ( @apmwebdev ),

Thanks again for all your guidance. I appreciate it. Luckily we only need the one tax nexus, so that’s good. But I have one follow-up regarding the in-state sales tax. I can’t tell if I’m doing something or if there’s a bug in the plugin. I recorded a quick video to show the issue as it occurs: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/WDaHZoU85FSsERdmv1fZkC?

Please let me know if you can offer any support.

Thanks

Hi @cschonhaut. Thanks for the video showing the issue. That’s definitely not normal and shouldn’t be happening. Are you using the WooCommerce Tax automated tax calculation, or the built-in WooCommerce tax functionality?

Also, can you post your system status report? You can find that by going to WooCommerce > Status in your dashboard, then clicking “Get system report,” then “Copy for support.”

Hi Austin,

Ok good – glad I’m not crazy. I’m using WooCommerce Tax automated tax calculation.

Here is the system report:

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Hi @cschonhaut. I’m sorry, I was actually incorrect before: It is normal and expected for WooCommerce Shipping and Tax to add the tax rates it fetches to your standard tax rates table. This is done for performance reasons. I had something misconfigured on my test site, but I was able to confer with a colleague and confirm the correct behavior.

While there doesn’t seem to be a way to make the newly added tax rates come in with shipping unchecked, you can instead do this from the shipping side of things. You can set the tax status of your shipping methods as “none” so that they are not taxed, as shown in this screenshot: https://d.pr/i/mYXNcz

Hi @cschonhaut,

I hope the workaround for the tax status worked. If not, please let us know.

I will go ahead and mark this thread as Resolved for now, and if you have further questions about other things please open a new thread.

Have a super day and stay healthy!