In this article, we show you how to optimally configure your shipping methods in Shopware 5 and save a lot of time creating shipping labels with our shipping adapters and Pickware WMS.

Your customers' requirements for the shipping of orders are diverse. While many prefer the cheapest possible standard shipping, others want special services such as express shipping, international delivery, or self-collection. To offer your customers several shipping options, you can manage different shipping methods in the Shopware backend under Settings → Shipping Costs and set individual cost calculations and additional conditions for each. If the products you offer differ significantly in weight and size, it's also a good idea to use shipping products from several providers. Usually, one provider's terms are cheaper for certain package sizes and weights than for others. This way, you can use different providers for small and large packages, for example. This saves you costs, or you can pass this advantage on to your customers by offering them cheaper standard shipping. We'll show you further below how to use a simple trick to automatically assign the optimal standard shipping method to an order.

To use the shipping adapters, you need to assign shipping products to the respective shipping methods of your shop. To do this, open the corresponding shipping method in the Shopware backend under Settings → Shipping Costs and assign a specific shipping product via the respective tab of the shipping provider.

As soon as your customer selects the corresponding shipping method during the ordering process, or you assign it to them as the standard shipping method, you can create and print the automatically configured shipping label directly in the order overview in the backend using the Add Shipping Label button. The shipping process is even faster with Pickware WMS. Here, you can generate the appropriate label directly during picking via the app.

To automatically assign your customers the cheapest standard shipping method based on certain factors such as weight, item dimensions, or product category, you can use a simple trick in Shopware: If you create several shipping cost types under the same name in the backend, e.g. Standard Shipping, these will be displayed to your customers in the frontend as a single shipping method. However, by setting individual rules for the different shipping cost types, the appropriate shipping product is always assigned for the respective order. You should therefore carefully analyze your products and orders with regard to optimal shipping costs, determine the factors necessary for the individual rules, and identify the cheapest shipping products from the service providers you use accordingly.

This can be illustrated with the following example: You offer your customers the shipping methods Deutsche Post Brief, DHL Paket bis 5 Kg, and DPD Paket 5 bis 10 Kg as Standard Shipping. You want to assign these based on the weight of the order. To do this, create three shipping cost types with the name Standard Shipping in the backend under Settings → Shipping Costs. Now set the shipping cost calculation by "price" for each shipping method and enter a shipping cost price. To distinguish between the shipping methods internally in the backend, you can add comments to them. Then switch to the Advanced Settings tab and set a weight range for which this shipping method should be used.

If you use the Pickware shipping adapters to conveniently create shipping labels, you can assign the appropriate shipping product from the respective service provider directly in the corresponding tab. When your customers select Standard Shipping during the ordering process, the appropriate shipping method and its service provider are automatically assigned, so that letter shipping is used for light orders, while the corresponding parcel shipping is used for heavier ones.

By combining several rules, you can also take multiple factors into account simultaneously. Custom conditions are also possible, for example, to take item dimensions or specific item numbers into account. Shopware provides further information and code examples for custom conditions.

In practice, there are often items that require a special shipping method, for example items subject to legally required age verification, or particularly large items that need to be shipped as bulky goods. To automatically assign the correct shipping method in these cases, you can assign a free text field / attribute to these items and include it as a custom condition in the shipping cost types. You can find a step-by-step guide for creating a bulky goods shipping method here. Once set up, all items marked as bulky goods are automatically assigned to the specially created shipping method. Using individual variable names, as in this example, you can similarly create rules for age verification and many other special shipping methods.