Table Rate Shipping in Magento

November 23

Hav­ing prob­lems with table rate ship­ping in Magento? Per­haps get­ting a lit­tle PHP notice say­ing “Notice: Unde­fined index: *”? I remem­ber it being a bit tricky when I tried using it myself. In the end, it turned out to be quite easy once you fig­ure out the fact that you always must spec­ify a coun­try when defin­ing table rate ship­ping in Magento.

More details can be found on the Magento wiki. To sum it up, you can­not use the “*” wild­card char­ac­ter when set­ting up your ship­ping rates. Instead, you’ll have to spec­ify a coun­try as follows:

"Country","Region/State","Zip/Postal Code","Weight (and above)","Shipping Price"
US,*,*,10,100

You should now have work­ing table rate ship­ping. There is, how­ever, a thread from Jan­u­ary 2009 on the Magento forums say­ing that you can work around this by first import­ing your CSV as above, then chang­ing the record in the “shipping_tablerate” data­base table, set­ting “dest_country_id” to 0.

I haven’t tried this method myself but if it works for the forum poster, I sus­pect that it will also work for the rest of us. One would think that Magento would offer a more explana­tory error mes­sage but I guess it’s a young plat­form and it will come later on. Until then, Google is our very best friend for solv­ing most Magento problems.

Other use­ful tips for table rate shipping:

  • To export an exam­ple CSV, go to Sys­tem — Con­fig­u­ra­tion — Ship­ping meth­ods — Table rate, and make sure your are in the “Main web­site” scope.
  • Edit the file using a plain text edi­tor, such as Notepad on Win­dows or TextE­dit on Mac. I per­son­ally use TextMate.
  • Of course, take backups.

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2 responses to “Table Rate Shipping in Magento”

  1. Tom
    Tom
    January 2 at 7:29 am |

    Thank you for this post. This may be a dumb ques­tion, but I am hav­ing a lot of dif­fi­culty find­ing where to upload this CSV file once it is com­plete. Could you give a lit­tle more detail?

  2. Daniel Nordstrom
    Daniel Nordstrom
    January 4 at 6:31 am |

    Thanks, Tom!

    Of course. If you’re in the “Main web­site” or what­ever web­site scope, you should see an “Import” field where you can browse for your file.

    When you’ve selected your CSV file, just click the usual “Save” but­ton at the top right cor­ner of the page. :)

    If I recall cor­rectly, it should show if there’s an error in the file.

    Screen­shot: http://tinypic.com/r/246tgus/6

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