Postcode zones are for when the price should depend on where in Australia the parcel is going — cheaper close to your warehouse, more for the regions. If one price table for the whole country suits you, you don't need a zone at all: the prices under Everywhere else already cover every Australian address.
Make a zone
- Open Shipping → Ship By PostCodes → Configure rates.
- Press Add zone and name it after the area a customer would recognise — "Melbourne metro", "Perth and surrounds".
- Give it postcode ranges. Ranges are inclusive, and a zone can hold several. Melbourne metro, for example, is 3000–3207; stretch to 3000–3335 to take in the growth corridors, and add 8000–8499 if you deliver to CBD PO boxes.
An address is matched to the first zone that contains its postcode. Anything no zone contains falls into Everywhere else — so that table is your safety net, and it is worth pricing even when every big city has its own zone.
Price the zone
Each zone has its own small price table: one row per weight — up to 1 kg, up to 3 kg, up to 5 kg — and one column per service, Standard and Express.
- Type the prices yourself, or
- press Fill from Australia Post and every empty row is priced from Australia Post's published retail prices, worked out from your own warehouse to that zone. Refilling replaces the prices it worked out and leaves any you typed alone.
Above 5 kg the price depends on the weight and the distance, and is worked out per order.
Publish — nothing reaches a customer until you do
Setting prices saves them; publishing is what customers feel. Go to Review and publish, read what will be written, and press Publish. Your prices land in your Shopify shipping settings as ordinary rates, which is why they work on every Shopify plan — no carrier-calculated shipping needed.
Change a price later? Edit, then publish again.
If the zone doesn't seem to apply
- A checkout address only gets zone prices when its postcode is inside one of the zone's ranges — a Geelong address (3220) is outside 3000–3207.
- Prices saved but never published never reach checkout.
- A parcel heavier than your heaviest band has no price in any zone; the order falls back to your other rates. Add a heavier band if that happens often.