Shipping Routes

🎯 What is a route?

A route is the connection between an origin zone and a destination zone. It’s what tells the system “yes, I ship from here to there.”

Origin Zone + Destination Zone = Route

Without an active route between two zones, there’s no possible price, no matter how well the zones are configured or how many rates you have.

Routes live under Rates → Routes (combinations).

🧭 Why they exist as a separate step

It might seem like a formality, but routes do three things no other part of the system does:

1. They define your actual service area. Having zones doesn’t mean you ship between all of them. The route is the explicit statement of which lanes you cover.
2. They can be turned off without deleting anything. If you temporarily stop covering a lane, turn it off and bring it back whenever you want, with its rates intact.
3. They store the base transit times. The estimated delivery days the customer sees come from here, not from the rate.

🔄 Direction matters

A route goes in one direction. “Capital → Interior” and “Interior → Capital” are two different routes.

This is deliberate: it’s very common for the return shipment to cost differently from the outbound one. If your operation charges the same in both directions, simply create both routes with the same rates.

A zone can be both the origin and destination of itself. The “Capital → Capital” route is for local shipments, and it’s usually the most used one.

➕ How to create a route

1. Go to Rates → Routes (combinations).
2. Click New route.
3. Choose the origin zone and the destination zone.
4. Optionally, enter the minimum and maximum transit days.
5. Leave it active.

There can only be one route per origin-destination pair. If you try to create one that already exists, edit the existing one instead.

🧮 How many routes you need

This is where a lot of people get scared: with 10 zones, the possible combinations are 100. But you don’t need to create them all.

The strategy that avoids the problem

Use the country’s catch-all zone as a safety net:

With three routes you cover the entire country. The third one catches any lane you hadn’t planned for, instead of leaving it without a price.

From there you add specific routes only where the price needs to be different. Each new specific route overrides the general one because its rate carries a lower priority number.

How many to create at the start

• Local operation: 1 or 2 routes.
• Regional operation: between 4 and 8.
• National operation: start with the catch-all route plus the 5 to 10 highest-volume ones, and grow as the business requires.

⏱️ Transit times

The minimum and maximum days you enter on the route are the ones shown when quoting. They’re defined here, and not on the rate, because they depend on the lane: the distance between two zones is the same whether the customer chooses the economy service or the express one.

If a specific service is clearly faster than the rest, reflect that in the service level’s name and description.

🔌 Activating and deactivating

Deactivating a route means no shipment between those zones can be quoted, even if it has rates configured.

This is useful when:

• You temporarily stop covering a lane by season.
• You’re preparing rates and don’t want them used yet.
• There’s a temporary operational issue on that corridor.

If a shipment that used to work suddenly stops getting quoted, the first thing to check is whether its route is still active. The rate tester tells you directly.

⚠️ When deleting zones

Deleting a zone also deletes all its routes and the rates on those routes. This isn’t reversible from the interface. Before deleting a zone, check how many routes it’s part of.

🔗 Next step

• Service levels you offer on each route
• Calculation methods to price them
• The rate tester, to check that your routes respond as expected

Questions setting up your routes? Contact our support team.