Overview
Antlered Crown is a specialty and divination online shop offering handcrafted tarot decks, mystical accessories, and spiritual tools designed for collectors and practitioners. The client wanted to enhance their WooCommerce store's functionality by optimizing shipping workflows, improving product management, and ensuring a seamless checkout experience.
Project Objective
The client contacted Virtina because they required a resolution for a critical shipping issue in their WooCommerce store, which offers physical and virtual products. Physical products require shipping with rates calculated via the DHL plugin, while virtual products do not require shipping and are processed digitally. The project aimed to diagnose WooCommerce conflicts, resolve shipping calculation issues, and enhance checkout efficiency.
Requirements and Challenges
Although the checkout process functioned correctly, customers encountered an error at the payment stage that prevented order completion. The error message stated: "Sorry, we cannot ship to your country without additional payment at checkout. Please send us an email request if you would like to pay the international shipping fees."
After extensive troubleshooting with DHL’s technical support, we confirmed that the issue originated within WooCommerce, not the DHL plugin. Initially, the client suspected that the Flexible Checkout Fields Pro plugin, which customizes checkout fields based on product types, interfered with DHL’s shipping calculations.
The project focused on resolving WooCommerce’s shipping issue while ensuring a seamless checkout experience.
Key priorities included the following.
Several challenges emerged, including potential plugin conflicts, restrictive WooCommerce shipping rules, and an unclear root cause affecting the payment process. Adjusting regional shipping settings to prevent unintended order blocks while preserving existing checkout customizations was crucial.
The project’s success depended on delivering a stable and efficient checkout system by optimizing WooCommerce shipping configurations and ensuring seamless plugin interactions.
Solutions
We traced to the Woo Conditional Shipping and Payments plugin, where a restriction was applied to certain states and counties, inadvertently blocking valid shipping destinations. This restriction overrides DHL’s shipping calculations, causing checkout errors.
The shipping conditions were reviewed and adjusted to resolve this, ensuring that only unsupported locations remained restricted while all valid regions were allowed. This correction restored proper shipping functionality, allowing physical products to be processed with DHL’s calculated rates and ensuring virtual products bypassed shipping requirements as intended. By refining these settings, the checkout process was stabilized, eliminating unnecessary errors and enabling seamless order completion.
Results
The WooCommerce checkout process was restored, allowing customers to complete purchases without errors. Adjustments to the Woo Conditional Shipping and Payments plugin ensured DHL’s rates were applied correctly and unnecessary restrictions were removed.
Conclusion
Virtina resolved Antlered Crown's WooCommerce shipping issue by identifying conflicts in the Woo Conditional Shipping and Payments plugin and refining settings. This ensured accurate DHL rates for physical products while virtual products bypassed shipping steps. The fix eliminated checkout errors, reduced cart abandonment, and improved the shopping experience. With a stable and scalable system, the client can now expand confidently.
