Service Levels

🎯 What is a service level?

A service level is each of the delivery options you offer your customers. They are the alternatives customers choose between when making a shipment.

The most common examples:

You manage them in Rates → Service Levels.

🧩 How they fit with the rest

A service level is independent of geography: it’s created once and works for all your routes. You can create it even before you have any zones.

What connects a service to a specific route is the rate. In other words:

Route + Service Level + Calculation Method = a rate

That means offering “Express” on one route and not on another doesn’t require creating two services: it’s enough to create the Express rate only on the route where you offer it.

⚠️ The rule that confuses people most

A service with no rate for a specific route doesn’t show up when quoting that route.

It’s the number one reason for “I created the Express service but my customers don’t see it.” The service exists, it’s active, and it still doesn’t show up, because there’s no rate that uses it on that route.

The consequence is useful: this is how you restrict a service to certain routes. If Express only makes sense on short distances, create its rate only on those routes and it will disappear from the rest on its own.

The rate tester tells you whether a service is missing because it has no rate, because the rate is outside its validity period, or because the package exceeds its limits.

➕ How to create a service level

1. Go to Rates → Service Levels.
2. Click New service level.
3. Fill in:
   • Name: what the customer will see. Be specific: “Express 24h” communicates better than “Premium.”
   • Description: the promise, in one line.
   • Display order: its position in the list of options.
4. Under Service attributes, decide two things:
   • Allow cash on delivery (COD): whether this service allows charging the recipient upon delivery. See the next section.
   • Includes pickup: whether creating an order with this service automatically generates a pickup at the sender’s address.
5. Leave it active.

Afterward, create a rate for that service on each route where you want to offer it.

💵 Cash on Delivery (COD)

The “Allow cash on delivery (COD)” switch decides whether a shipment with that service can carry an amount to charge the recipient at the time of delivery.

It’s off by default. A newly created service doesn’t accept cash on delivery until you turn it on by hand.

Where it’s actually decided

It’s decided at the service level, not per rate. This is the most common source of confusion:

If you turn on cash on delivery for the “Standard” service, it becomes active for all “Standard” rates, on all your routes.

There’s no way to allow it on one route and deny it on another using the same service. If you need that difference, the solution is to create two separate services — for example “Standard” and “Standard with COD” — and give each one its own rates on the corresponding routes.

What changes for whoever creates the order

With the switch turned on, when reaching the service selection step:

• The option shows a green COD label.
• Selecting it reveals the “Amount to Collect (Cash on Delivery)” field.
• If the declared value has been filled in, the amount to collect is automatically suggested with that figure. It can be changed or left at zero.
• If the order is confirmed with a zero amount, the system asks for confirmation — in case it was an oversight.

With the switch turned off, neither the label nor the field appear: there’s no way to assign a charge to that order. If an amount arrives anyway, the system rejects the order with the message “The selected shipping service does not allow Cash on Delivery (COD).”

If you turn it off later

• Already created orders keep their amount: nothing is erased, and they keep showing up in the collected COD report.
• New orders with that service can no longer carry a charge.
• If you edit an old order for that service, the system will ask you to leave the amount at zero before saving. That’s the expected effect of having removed the permission.

So it’s best to turn it off when you’ve genuinely stopped offering the charge, not as a temporary measure.

A limit worth knowing

Shipments picked up at a network office don’t accept cash on delivery, even if the service allows it. If you need to collect payment on delivery, use a home delivery.

Don’t confuse it with two other things

The declared value is never charged: it’s used as a reference and, at most, suggested as the amount. The courier only collects what’s listed as the cash-on-delivery amount.

And having the report module turned off doesn’t prevent creating orders with cash on delivery: they’re two independent settings.

🔢 Display order

Defines the order in which the customer sees the options. It’s not a minor detail: the first option is the one chosen most often.

Two common criteria:

• Cheapest to most expensive: conveys that you have competitive prices.
• Most used to least used: reduces clicks for most of your customers.

Services with the same display order number are shown alphabetically, so it’s best to give them different numbers.

🔌 Deactivating a service

A deactivated service disappears from every quote, on every route, without touching its rates. When you reactivate it, everything stays as it was.

It’s the correct way to temporarily remove an option: much better than deleting its rates, which is irreversible.

💡 How many to offer

Between two and four is usually reasonable.

• With just one, the customer doesn’t perceive a choice.
• With more than four, the decision becomes uncomfortable and the differences stop being obvious.

What matters is that the difference between one and another is easy to explain in one sentence. If you can’t summarize it, your customer won’t understand it either.

🔗 Next step

• Shipping routes where to offer each service
• Calculation methods to price them
• The rate tester, to check which services show up on each route
• Collected COD Module, the report of money collected on deliveries

Questions about your service levels? Contact our support team.