How to enable table rates in Magento 2 by uploading a CSV file?

Say, your warehouse is located in Los Angeles, California. It’s cheaper for you to ship to San Francisco, California, than to New York City.

So, you can use table rate to determine shipping costs basing on the following combinations:

• weight v. destination
• price v. destination
• number of items v. destination

So, how to configure table rates as a shipping method.

Table rates settings

To start using table rates, follow the steps:

1. go to Stores → Settings → Configuration, then open the Sales tab and click on the Shipping Methods
2. go to the Table Rates section and choose Yes in the Enable field
3. enter the Title and Method Name that you want to display on the frontend
4. choose the calculation method in the Condition filed
5. if you want to add virtual products to the calculation, set Include Virtual Products in Price Calculation to Yes 
6. if needed, fill out the Calculate Handling Fee and Handling Fee fields
7. enter the message that you want to show in case the method is unavailable in the Displayed Error Message field
8. pick countries for which the shipping method will be available in the Ship to Applicable Countries field
9. enter the Sort Order of the shipping method and save the changes
10. to configure the CSV file, choose the needed Store View, and click on Export CSV 
11. download the shipping table rates file on your computer, open it, and fill in the table with the needed values (follow the official guide)
12. once ready, save the file, and return to the Table Rates section
13. double-check the Store View setting in the left corner. Next, find the Import field and click on Choose File 
14. import the needed file from your computer, and save the configurations
15. go to the frontend and check the result

What are the Magento 2 shipping rates? 

Magento 2 shipping rates are the amount of money you charge customers for shipping items. Say, your shipping rate depends on the cart subtotal and state. For states where you have warehouses, you have preferential rates. In this case, you will use the Price v. Destination condition.

In the table below, you can see how the shipping fee changes according to cart subtotal for all the orders with shipping region California (CA) and Utah (UT):

The shipping price is lower for these states than for the rest of the country and varies from $5 to $15. The symbol * represents all values i.e. if we put * in the Zip Code column, that means we want to use this rule for all the addresses of this region.

What is flat rate shipping in Magento?

Flat rate shipping Magento means that the shipping price is not related to the weight, shape, or size of the item being shipped. With flat-rate shipping, you can charge a flat rate for sending all orders to specific geographic areas, regardless of the number of items ordered.