Shipping zones are the geographical areas where your shipments will be delivered. Every order is assigned a shipping zone to calculate the shipping time and costs.
Proper knowledge of shipping zones not only helps you be efficient by reducing distance and shipping transit time, but it also helps in reducing shipping costs, improving sales leading to a higher growth rate for your business.
In this article, you will learn
What are the different shipping zones?
How is a shipping zone assigned for an order?
How does the shipping zone impact an order?
How to reduce the impact of shipping zones on an order?
What are the different shipping zones?
Eshopbox has divided the shipment zones for an order as follows:
Local: When the pickup and delivery locations are either within the same city or within a designated metropolitan area (e.g., Delhi NCR). This includes instances where the cities differ but are treated as part of the same local region, such as a pickup from Delhi and delivery to Noida.
Note: You can refer to the pin code serviceability to determine the zone classification for specific pin codes.
Zonal: When the pickup and delivery locations are within the same state and within a 500 km distance.
Metro: When the pickup and delivery locations for an order are in metro cities. For example, an order is picked up from New Delhi and delivered in Bangalore. Click here for the list of metro pin codes.
National: When the pick-up and delivery locations for an order are within the same state, but the distance is more than 500 km or if the pickup and delivery locations are in different states. This excludes the regions of North East and Jammu & Kashmir.
Remote: When any or both pick-up and delivery locations for an order are done in the Northeast region, Jammu and Kashmir, and a few regions of Himachal Pradesh, Click here for the list of remote pin codes.
How is a shipping zone assigned for an order?
Depending on the fulfilment location address and the delivery address, the shipping zone for an order is assigned as local, zonal, metro, national or remote.
For example, if a customer places an order from Gurgaon and it is being shipped from a fulfilment location in Gurgaon, then the shipping zone for this order will be Local.
How does the shipping zone impact an order?
The shipping zone of an order impacts the delivery time as well as the shipping costs.
Shipping time: If an order is to be shipped locally to zonally, then the shipping time for the order will be less compared to an order being shipped nationally.
Shipping costs: Shipping zones are used to calculate the shipping costs. The shipping costs for an order assigned with a national shipment zone will be higher than that for a local order.
For example, if a customer places an order in Mumbai and the order is being fulfilled from a fulfilment location in New Delhi, then the order will be assigned a National shipping zone.
The timeline for delivery, as well as the shipping costs, will be higher for this order as compared to an order being fulfilled from a fulfilment location within Mumbai.
How to reduce the impact of shipping zones on an order?
To minimize shipping delays and costs, you need to distribute your inventory in zones with higher order volumes. Fulfilling all inventory from a single location can result in longer delivery times to distant destinations and higher shipping costs. By utilizing multiple fulfilment centres instead of just one for fulfilling orders, you can efficiently ship a more significant number of orders to lower zones, i.e. local or zonal.
This would significantly reduce the average shipping cost per order as well as the delivery timeline. The ideal fulfilment locations for keeping your inventory are those that place your inventory closer to popular order destinations, which can be determined by analyzing your past order history.
You can analyse the ideal distribution of your inventory for your orders using the Regional utilisation report. Learn here how to track regional utilisation using Eshopbox shipping.