For any WooCommerce store, a shipment tracking mechanism is very important, customers always want to know exactly where their products are and why it is reaching to them. By default, WooCommerce doesn’t provide any shipment tracking method so we will use a third-party plugin for this.
Shipment tracking plugin
We are going to use Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce plugin for adding shipment details in our store. This plugin is free to use and has a lot of features available for completely free. It also has a paid premium option and if you can purchase you should else you are good to go with the free version.
Installation of this plugin is as usual just go to the WordPress plugin section and search for “Advance Shipment Tracking” and you will see the plugin as shown above install and activate it.
Setup
Now let’s know about the setup of this plugin. After the activation of this plugin, you will see the Shipment Tracking option in the WooCommerce section click on it. Now from the settings page, you can set the configuration of this plugin.
In General Settings, the first option you see is to automatically mark the product as shipped when you add tracking details of any product.
After that, you can choose in which emails you want to add tracking number and details, by default Complete, Partially shipped and Updated Tracking is added.
Next, you can choose for which Order status you want to show the tracking action button to change or update tracking details.
The next checkbox is for if you want to show tracking details on the order history page.
After that, you’ll see the checkbox of the opening link of tracking on a separate page.
And the last thing of this section is to choose the date format for your API server, so you can manage it with external software easily.
The next section is Order Status. In this section, you can opt for renaming the completed order status to shipped.
After that, you can enable if you want a partially shipped label for the product. You can select a color for this label and also font type. You can also mark if you want to send an email when the order status labeled as partially shipped.
Now the next setting tab is for choosing Shipping Providers, by default 316 providers are already added to this list. You can choose any of your partner shippers from this list. However, if you don’t see your shipping partner in that list you can also add a shipping provider to that list.
To add your shipping providers click on the plus icon from the top right, in the popup dialog fill in your shipping provider details, and click on Add custom provider. Your custom provider will now be available in shipping action.
Now the next tab is for customizing the emails of your tracking status email. You can customize email templates as you customize your themes.
The next tab CSV Import is for importing tracking info in CSV bulk but beware of doing it. First, download the template which is available on the same page to download and check the guide on how to properly import the details.
The other two tabs are for pro options so let’s just leave them for now. If you are opting for free way those are useless for you anyway.
After the setup let’s add tracking details to any product, to add go to WooCommerce>orders and select the order you want to add tracking details.
Now in the top right, you’ll see Add Tracking Info button after clicking on it you can add the tracking number, provider from your provider list, date of shipping, and mark the order as shipped or partially shipped. After that click on Save Tracking.
Now the tracking status should be updated for your user. Users will receive an email with tracking detail and number and can click on the tracking number to check the shipment detail on the provider’s website and the tracking number should be automatically filled for the user.
If you face any issue while setting this plugin let us know in the comment below. Also, if you know about some better method of adding shipment tracking in WooCommerce share with us too.