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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