Let sellers define their own custom regions for shipping zones

Gaston.La.Brick

I am currently in the process of entering new shipping prices (2024) and at the mean time re-evaluating my shipping setup.
There are a few predefined regions, but at least in my case, none are really useful as - again: at least in my case - there are a lot of different shipping rates for different sets of countries. More over, I do not want to ship to all countries within a predefined region.

Because of the way shipping is set up in BO, I must re-enter all countries for each shipping method. This is cumbersome and hard to maintain.

So I was thinking: would it be feasible a seller defines their own "private" regions (sets of countries), which he can easily re-use when defining the shipping methods? It would help at least me a lot, I wonder if other sellers would see this as a useful feature as well.

Hoddie

It would be a useful addition I agree, as you could set regions based on how your country's postal service defines them.

Lawrence

After you have created a shipping method, when you next create a shipping method, you can base it on the previous one. So you can easily copy the selected countries that way.

Gaston.La.Brick

I use that copy feature to copy dimensions configurations.
Like an XS parcel is max 60 cm width, and so on.
I need to make copies of those configurations for each region I ship to. This is in my case four: Benelux (3 countries) , Europe 1 (4 countries), Europe 2 (12 countries), World (8 countries).

You are right I could turn it around and first create one size configuration per group of countries, but in that case the problem is shifted to the re-use of configurations becoming prone to errors.

Now, that being said, what I am thinking now is : why not offer "Configuration as Code" for shipping? I can download a full configuration as an XML or JSON, alter or extend it in a script editor (with my own macros and what not) and re-upload it
It seems many BO sellers are quite tech savvy and would find their way in such "configuration as Code". The others can of course still use the UI.

I see these "configurations as Code" appearing in more and more systems, exactly to facilitate complex configurations and avoiding cumbersome and error prone manual UI interactions.

Gaston.La.Brick

And to extend to my own comment: also very useful to create backups of a shipping configuration.

Lawrence

Okay thank you for the response, I understand the issue with the suggestion I provided

Lawrence

Taking a look at this again, I realise it's not easy to copy/paste the countries from one shipping method to another. Would that resolve the issue if that was fixed?