In most cases WooCommerce will show a couple fields to allow the customer to calculate their shipping cost in the cart. This is always the country field and zip- / postcode field, and sometimes in between those the state / province field.
This is a good start, but for some of you who have shipping setup based on other kinds of variables using the Advanced Shipping plugin this isn’t enough. Say for example you have the shipping based on customer’s city, in that case he won’t be able to calculate his shipping in the cart, while this is a great feature to have.
Modifying the shipping calculator fields
In this post I’m going to give you some code snippets that show you how you can modify the shipping calculator by adding and/or deleting the available fields.
Enabling the city field / disable postcode / ZIP
WooCommerce has two fields build in that can easily be enabled / disabled from the calculator. You can turn on the city field and disable the postcode field with another. Later on I’ll show how you can add other fields too, but that does require more effort.
With this code snippet you can enable the city field:
And with this code snippet to disable the existing postcode / ZIP field:
Going deeper: Modifying and adding other fields
As mentioned the other (country / state) fields cannot be easily disabled, nor can you easily (with one line of code) add other fields. To accomplish this you’d need to override the existing template file of the calculator in your child theme.
Don’t have a child theme or know how to override template files? Read these posts to catch up on that:
– Read more about child themes
– Read more about WooCommerce template overriding
Locate and override the template ‘templates/cart/shipping-calculator.php
Make sure you have the ‘shipping-calculator.php’ script copied to your own child theme and set to the correct directory (‘woocommerce/cart/’). In case you’re unsure if you got the right script, here’s a link to the source from WooCommerce: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/2.6.0/templates/cart/shipping-calculator.php
Removing the country field
In the case where you only ship to one country it may be useful to remove the country field. Otherwise the customer would still see a dropdown with only one option. Instead it would be good to just show the country name.
You can also do the same thing for like the state field.
PS. you don’t have to comment out the old code, you can also remove it, but it can be good for reference.
Adding a custom field
If you’ve added a custom shipping field for example through my Advanced Checkout Fields plugin (or another plugin / code snippet) you can also add this to the shipping calculation. This does require some extra work to ensure WooCommerce is also saving the values you’re sending through the calculator.
Example scenario: You’ve added a dropdown at the checkout with a few options for the customer to choose from. I’m going to call my custom field ‘Area’.
First we want to add the same type of dropdown to the shipping calculator:
This is a example of adding a dropdown, but depending on your needs you may need to modify it to fully fit your needs. You can position this anywhere within the little form.
Now it is showing the dropdown, but not yet using it to calculate the shipping. For that we need a code snippet placed within the themes function.php file.
Saving the custom calculator field value
Next we need to ensure the custom field we created is also used properly for the calculation of the shipping. In this case we want to assign the value set to the shipping_area of the customer, which can also be setup as condition for the shipping.
The code snippet below checks if the value is available, and if so it will save it to the customer object.
And thats the end of it! Hope it helped you out, let me know if you run into anything as it is a bit more complex to set this up properly.
Jeroen Sormani
I'm a professional WordPress plugin developer on a mission to create the best plugins for my clients. I'm specialised in developing general WordPress, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads plugins.
Interested in talking about a WordPress project? Get in touch!
Leave a Reply
Who’s this guy?
My name is Jeroen, go ahead and try to pronounce that! I bet you get it wrong if you’re not Dutch 
I am a professional WordPress Plugin Developer, working from Alphen aan den Rijn in the Netherlands. Besides being a seasoned developer, I have a solid background in SEO and have been responsible for hundreds of websites and webshops in my previous work experience.
I build custom plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. My focus is to build the best, secure, reliable, optimized plugins with a good User Experience.
When not working, I like to watch tv series and eat some healthy home-made pizza.
38 thoughts on “Modifying the WooCommerce cart shipping calculator”
Very good Article Jeroen,
Could you please post the snippet to remove the state from the shipping calculator.
I want to leave just the country dropdown list
Thank you
Hi Stavros,
I’m afraid there’s not an easy code that you can use to disable the state field (no hooks available).
The only way to disable that is by overriding the shipping calculator template file and remove it directly in there.
Cheers,
Jeroen
does the line below get placed inside the functions.php files?
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_shipping_calculator_enable_postcode’, ‘__return_false’ );
Hi Steve,
That is correct, functions.php in your child theme would be the easiest way to integrate this.
Cheers,
Jeroen
How do you modify the text for “Calculcate Shipping”?
Hi Jeroen ,
I am struggling here with modifying the shipping calculator fields and hope you will be able to help.
Can I make the postcode field required but only for specific countries?
For example I want the post code to be required for UK but not for Denmark..Is this possible?
help please….much appreciated!
Thanks in advance
Hi Diana,
There is a work-around, but it isn’t the best.
You could hook into the postcode validation functionality and allow postcodes in Denmark to be empty. The downside of that is that probably other areas such as the checkout may be affected by that too.
Cheers,
Jeroen
Hi Jeroen,
Is there a way to make the postcode field mandatory
Hi Jeroen,
I would like to know, how can I remove or hidden the coutry field and state field in my shipping calculator of the woocommerce. Because I would like to calculate the shipping by the zipcode. Is it possible? How can I do this?
thanks.
Hi Jeroen,
great article! I’ve a question for you: all my shipping classes have the same cost for Italy without differences related to cities or ZIP code, and my shop sell and ship only in Italy. Is it possible to avaid the shipping calculation and show immediately the shipping cost?
Many thanks
Have a great life
Beppe
Hi Beppe,
Yes you can setup shipping rates in WC flat rate settings to be based on the shipping class.
Then in the WC Settings you can configure to use the shop base address as the default shipping calculation, which will make WC calc. cost immediately without having to enter data in the shipping calculator.
Cheers,
Jeroen
Hi!
Mi struggling with shipping fees right now. I already have states and cities enabled, the problem now is: how to add cities into the calculation. I mean, if customer is buying from city X (state A) fee is going to be $5, but if he purchases from city Y ( State A), fee would be $9. Di you have any ideó on how to do it?
Thank you in advance
Hi Sebastian,
It depends on your setup, if you can setup the shipping rates based on the city postcodes you can use WC Core shipping options. Otherwise I’d recommend looking at a plugin to setup shipping cost, my Advanced Shipping plugin does allow you to setup shipping cost per city.
Cheers,
Jeroen
Hi Jeroen,
How can I place my shipping calculator on store page? I tried to modify the code numerous times but without satisfying effect. Would it be at all possible?
Thank you
Hi,
I do believe this is possible, but not something that is covered in this blog post. You’d need to go a different route to accomplish something like that then whats described in here.
Cheers,
Jeroen
Hey,
awesome info in here.
Any hint why:
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_shipping_calculator_enable_city’, ‘__return_false’ );
does not hide city menu? 😀
Just for info:
i was refferring to “province” field in italian version.
And it, of course, can be hidden using
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_shipping_calculator_enable_province’, ‘__return_false’ );
Anyway thanks for pointing me in the right direction mate!
how do we access the WC()->customer->__set( ‘shipping_area’, $area ); value after it is set?
WC()->customer->__get('shipping_area')or since its a magic method;WC()->customer->shipping_area. Haven’t tested this.Is there a way to replace the shipping calculator with text that says “Shipping calculated at checkout” ? I feel like I’ve searched everywhere for a way to do this and this is the closest I’ve found to something that might work.
For some reason it just shows shipping as a blank field on the cart page. If I go to checkout it says “Enter your full address to see shipping costs.”
Then if I enter my address and go back to the cart page, it displays the shipping options. I want it to display “Shipping calculated at checkout” before anything is ever entered.
I appreciate any insight you might have regarding this. Thank you for sharing the info you already have
Hi Courtney,
A similar message is already available in WooCommerce, you just have to enable this setting; https://cl.ly/3n2t461n3v0b
Cheers,
Jeroen
Hello Jeroen,
How can make the postcode field mandatory?
Thank you.
Hi Paris,
I don’t think there’s a standardized way to make any of the shipping calculator fields mandatory in Woo, so far none of them are mandatory to set, if I check the country field you can leave it empty and it will allow it.
Regards,
Jeroen
Thanks Jeroen.
Have a nice day.
Hello Great Article Bro!
I have shipping Calculator On My Site. The Issue Is it automatically shows up 16$ even before customer enters data in field. I want to remove that 16$.
If you could help me ? How can i do this?
Thanks 🙂
Please how do you make a dropdown of cities in the shipping calculator. It appears as text field
Are there other fields that can be removed – State and County and is it
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_shipping_calculator_enable_county’, ‘__return_false’ );
add_filter( ‘woocommerce_shipping_calculator_enable_state’, ‘__return_false’ );
Well they didn’t work. What are the filters to remove State and County?
Jeroen,
Thanks for the great snippet.
Any ideas how to either fill out state and city fields based on zip code entry or display the shipping method error if they are not matching by the address verification of the shipping method.
Either one of these will fix the Fedex shipping method not showing when they do not match. This only happens with Fedex Basic. USPS Simple does not care as long as the zip is right.
Re Removing the country field
It seems when i add this code to my template child theme, the country isnot available anymore. The shiipiing cost canot be clacluted?
Do I need osme extra to have my only ship to country as default?
There’s a setting in the General section that allows for setting the default customer country 😉
bro bro bro bro brooooo You have done alot for me by this article, whish u all the best maaaaaan <3