Why we price shipping by governorate, not by weight
The first thing a new merchant asks is “how do I set up shipping?” The first thing that surprises them is that we never ask what the product weighs.
Weight assumes a courier who calculates it
Pricing by weight makes sense when you hand the parcel to a company with a rate table by weight and zone, and an API that hands the number back. That is the assumption the global platforms are built on.
In Syria the parcel usually goes with a courier you telephone, or a bus office, or somebody you know. None of them asks what it weighs. They ask which governorate.
So we built on the question that gets asked
You set a price for each of the fourteen governorates. The ones you do not serve are switched off, so their shoppers see “no delivery available” at checkout instead of ordering and getting an apologetic phone call — and that call costs you the customer, not just the order.
- An independent price per governorate, changeable whenever
- An optional free-shipping threshold above an amount you choose
- A fallback rate for anything you have not configured
- Store pickup as a zero-rate option
What we do not do
We do not calculate weights or dimensions, we do not book a shipment with a courier over an API, and we do not print labels. Those need a shipping partner with an interface, and no dominant one exists here yet. When one does, we will build it.
The label was never the hard part: once the courier takes the parcel, the money is with them and not with you. That is why there is a separate ledger matching what the courier collected against what actually reached you.