Ecommerce Zones

Zones are a powerful way to set  your ecommerce store's custom shipping and sales tax policies.    In the ShopKeeper, you can define customer locations or "zones" that determine how to calculate these charges on an order.  During checkout, the customer information is checked to see if he falls within a particular zone.  If he does, then any tax or shipping policy set for that zone is applied to the order.

The most important thing to remember about zones is that they are built independent of the shipping or taxes.  The zone is then used when creatiing a shipping or sales tax policy.  While your store has many options for custom shipping and sales tax polciies, this is really beyond the topic of zones and we'll reserve that for a future posting.

So,  back to Zones....

What constitutes a Zone?  A zone is created by  assigning sectors to it.   Zone sectors are geopolitical boudaried areas and can be any of the following:

1. Country
2. State / Province / Region
3. US County
4. US Postal Code

A zone can be assigned one or more sectors and it can have a single or different types of  sectors.   This grouping of sectors you biild is then given its own descriptive name and "Voila!" you have a zone.  You can have zones, for anything from a municipality or city to a county/region to an entire country.  It's all under your control.

When using zones, during  the checkout process, the customer's order  info is determined to see if falss within any of your zones.  It always matches the smallest sector (and its zones) first  before moving on to match with  larger ones.  This way you can have a city policy inside a state policy or a multi-state policy inside a county policy.

Let's assume that all necessary zones have already been created in a QuadCommerce store and go through an example.

Example:  a customer who is ordering from Utica, NY, 13502 in the Unites States would match,   the Utica zone based on the 13502 ZIP code he has provided.   While it is true that  the customer also matches the Oneida County zone,  the New York State zone, and the United States zone,  QuadCommerce matches him against the smallest zone sector first.  (The Utica NY zone would most likeley contain all the Postal Codes for Utica.)

Now,  assume that there was no Utica, NY zone.   The same customer would then match the Oneida County zone as this is the next smallest sector that matches the order info.  Pretty simple, huh?

Give us a comment if you have any questions on QuadCommerce Zones. 

Tags: e-commerce, sales tax, shipping, zones, QuadCommerce

Posted March 26th, 2009 by QC Dev Team