Setting up shipping zones

Updated 19 August 2026

A zone answers "where?": which addresses get this set of delivery options. Build zones on Shipping & rates. Select Add zone, name it, pick its countries, then set its Coverage.

Ways to define a zone

The coverage choices depend on the country the zone covers:

• Whole country: e.g. all of the United Kingdom. (GB, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man are treated as one UK cluster.)
• By state (US) or By province (Canada): e.g. mainland vs islands.
• By postcode, By ZIP code or By Eircode: the precision tool:
  • Patterns: EH*, G1 *, UK district-aware matching (spaces and case do not matter, eh11ab matches EH1 1AB). Northern Ireland is its BT postcodes.
  • Ranges: 90000–96199 for US ZIPs.
  • Cover only the postcodes you list, or everywhere except them.
• By city: available for the United Arab Emirates. It is marked "coming soon" for the US and Canada.

Postcode entry is validated per country (UK, US, CA, AU, NL, FR, JP, CH and more have their own formats), and save errors point you to the exact zone and entry that failed.

Add shipping options to the zone

Inside each zone, select Add shipping option. Each option is a shipping profile: one of the choices a shopper gets at checkout. Per option you set:

• Name: what appears at checkout, e.g. "Standard delivery", "Local same-day".
• Description: an optional line under the name.
• Price: a flat price, or tiers by order value. See rates and pricing.
• Delivery: the days you ship, the transit time (fixed days, or live UPS/FedEx transit), and the days you deliver.
• Date picker: whether shoppers choose a date for this option.
• Availability: when the option is offered at all (cart value, weight, products, and more).

Select Done to close the option, then save the page.

One zone wins per address

Zones may overlap, but Flare uses only one of them for a given shopper. It takes the first zone in your list that matches the address and still has an option the cart can use. Options from the other matching zones are not added.

So if Edinburgh shoppers should see Standard and Same-day, put both options in the Edinburgh zone. Keep the narrow zone above the wide one in the list, because order decides the winner.

Mixed carts and safety

If no single profile can handle every item in the cart (say frozen items excluded from your postal profile), Flare refuses to offer an option that would strand part of the order rather than show a misleading rate. Design one catch-all profile per zone that can take any cart, or use Product & customer rules to keep incompatible items apart.

Preview before going live

New zones stay a Draft until you publish them, and a draft changes nothing for shoppers. Select Preview to see what a shopper in each region would get, then select Go live when it is right. To test any address and cart combination quickly, ask Sparky to run it.