There are no shipping options available. Please ensure that your address has been entered correctly, or contact us if you need any help.

– WooCommerce famous error alert

The worse nightmare of running an eCommerce web store is when you receive a call or an email from a customer complaining they aren’t able to order from your website.

When launching a business online is as easy as plugging a shopping cart with your CMS, chances are you run into a lot of misconfigurations and broken shopping rules. This makes it imperative to have expert guidance for the smooth functioning of your web store. One can also get a lot of help from the Woocomerce tutorials and documentations.

The majority of businesses use Woocommerce shopping cart applications for their online business. Although there are many Woocommerce alternatives in the market, the Woocommerce shopping cart is one of the most popular and most versatile plugins. This plugin is for WordPress CMS-based websites.

Configuring the right settings of your Woocommerce shopping cart application is imperative for the proper functioning of your online business and calculating the right shipping fees is one of them. Charging the correct shipping rates can make or break your online business. We have seen businesses offering FREE shipping were forced to charge shipping fees after few months of business.

One of the reasons your web store isn’t able to calculate the shipping cost due to no shipping method or no shipping option available for the customers’ shipping address.

Digging a bit deeper into the cause of this issue will reveal either of the following:

• The product customer is ordering does not have its weight/dimension set properly.
• The auto-calculation services (APIs) of the third-party shipping calculation services aren’t working properly.
• There isn’t any shipping method/shipping class set for the product or for the customer’s delivery location in the Woocommerce shipping zone settings.
• Worse the logistic company doesn’t deliver to the customer’s address.

The majority of businesses who use Woocommerce / Shopify would know this error alert on the cart page or the final check-out page. During their setting up of their shopping store or in their running site, this alert would have cropped up when shipping methods or shipping options weren’t set properly.

The worst part of this error is when customers call and complain saying they couldn’t order as the shipping cost couldn’t be calculated.

Let us take a deeper look into each of the issues and how to rectify it.

When a product with either missing or incorrect weight or dimension values, the shopping cart isn’t able to calculate shipping cost properly.

When adding a product, make sure the Weight and Dimensions of the product are added. It can be accessed from the left side Shipping tab.

Almost all of the shipping cost calculators such as FedEx shipping cost calculators, USPS shipping rates calculators, shipping cost calculators from UPS, DHL, TNT, and Indian players like DTDC, Shiprocket, etc use the weight and dimension of the product to determine the shipping cost.

Together with the shipping location, the final shipping cost is calculated at the checkout step.

If the product weight and dimensions are properly set and still getting this “There are no shipping options available” error, ensure that the shipping cost calculator APIs are working properly.

Check the shipping rates calculator plugin settings (integration Id /secrete key etc) and enable/disable the plugin once to see if they are calculating the shipping cost accurately.

Another reason why the correct shipping cost isn’t being calculated is when the shipping zone or shipping class isn’t configured for that location or product.

Woocommerce shipping classes and shipping zones are very important for calculating the right shipping rates. Woocommerce shipping classes are basically product types that you sell that may have different shipping rates based on their dimension, weight, or even nature.

For instance, you could be selling T-shirts, books, sanitizers, shoes, or even digital downloads. Not all products will have the same shipping cost. Digital downloads, for e.g, can have FREE shipping so when someone adds to their cart, the shipping rates formula will not calculate shipping rates for digital downloads.

Another use case for shipping class is where you bundle products and sell product combo. Suppose you calculate shipping rates per book (Rs. 50) and you want to sell a three-book combo. You can pass on shipping rates discount on the combo offer; so you define a separate shipping class “product combo” and assign a Fixed-rate shipping method, say Rs. 120 a saving of Rs. 30 for the customer. Make sense?

As you can see in the above screenshot, a Weight Based Shipping method configured for “Locations not covered by your other zones” is used when no shipping zone is defined. This means when no shipping method is defined for any location, the fallback shipping zone “Locations not covered by your other zones”, and its shipping method is applied to calculate the shipping cost.

To check which shipping zone is enabled for an address, you can “Enable debug mode” from the Shipping Options tab in the Woocommerce Settings page. When enabled, an alert will show on the Cart page and the Checkout page. This helps in debugging the shipping zone and shipping methods being applied for a location/product.

Sometimes after checking all of the settings you find the shipping calculation isn’t working and the error “No shipping options were found for …” still shows, it could be that the shipping cost calculator isn’t able to get data for the customer’s shipping location from the shipping cost calculator APIs.

This means the shipping company doesn’t service in that area. One can check up with the logistic company and confirm.

In the ideal scenario when all of the Woocommerce setting options, shipping zones, shipping classes, and shipping rate calculator plugins are configured correctly, the shipping rate will be calculated properly helping your business charge the correct amount for the logistics.

With your comments, let us know what issue you ran into while setting up your shopping cart application?

Our expert team will be happy to help resolve any of your shopping cart problem or would love to help with your next web application project.