Before troubleshooting your ship rates, you will need to be familiar with how to create and edit shipping rates and methods. If you are not familiar with this, please review How do I calculate shipping?

When troubleshooting ship rates, first view the order(s) that are miscalculating and make note of the specifics of the order that affect the shipping (i.e., ZIP code, price, shipping method, and also the ship-weight of the products if you are using the built-in shipping table or weight-based rates).

Review the orders that are not calculating correctly. Often there is something in common among the orders that are miscalculating. Look for what these orders have in common.

For example:

• Are they all a particular state, country, or zip code?
• Was a particular shipping method used for all of them?
• Are they only foreign orders?

Review what orders your current rules are set to apply to.

• Click Ship Rates from the Shipping Manager to see a list of all the rates you have set up in a table.
• The left column shows what area and shipping method that rule applies to.
• The middle column shows the rates.
• You can edit the rule by clicking Edit on the right.

Here are some things to check if some orders are not being charged, if none of your orders are being charged, or if they're being under or over-charged:

• Make sure that you've published the order settings since the last time you changed your shipping rules.
• Make sure the Need-ship, Need-bill, and Need-payment variables are set properly depending on the rules being used.
• Check these settings in Checkout & Registration Manager.
• On the item pages, make sure that the variable Need-ship is set to Yes, make sure you have a Ship-weight set, and the Taxable variable is set correctly.
• Check the rates you've entered to see if they fit what you want or expect. Also if you haven't purposely set up two or more rates to apply to particular orders, make sure that you don't have two different rules both applying to these orders.

If viewing the ship rates doesn't give you the information you need, you can use Shipping and Tax Test (in the Shipping Manager) to see exactly how much was applied from each rate setting. View the problem order (or orders) and get the ZIP code, price, shipping method, and also the ship-weight of the products if you use the built-in shipping table or have weight-based rates. Enter this information in the Shipping and Tax Test section of your manager, and click Calculate.

The results will then show you how much shipping and tax would be charged, or it will show no charges if the order information you entered did not match any ship rates you have set up.