Shipping rates by postcode at the Shopify checkout
How to have customers on the islands and in remote areas pay your courier's surcharge, with a rule that reads the delivery postcode.
The case
Couriers do not treat the whole of Italy the same way. Sicily, Sardinia, the small islands, the Venice lagoon, Livigno: there a surcharge lands on you, or the parcel takes a few days longer.
Your shop has one rate for Italy. An order from Lampedusa pays what an order from Bologna pays, and you cover the difference.
You ship anywhere in Italy with "Standard courier" at 6.90 €. For the islands your courier asks 12 € more, so you created "Islands and remote areas" at 18.90 €. At the checkout both show up, and nobody picks the one at 18.90 €.
With Shopify alone
Shipping zones are built from countries and provinces. The postcode, CAP in Italian, is not among them: you can make a zone for Italy, not a zone for "postcodes starting with 9". Postcodes belong to local delivery, which is a different thing: the delivery you drive yourself around the shop.
So both rates sit in the same zone and the customer sees both. In Palermo they pick the one at 6.90 €, as anyone would.
With a rule
The rule hides the normal rate when the postcode is on the islands. Address conditions are on the Starter plan.
Open the app, click New rule and call it "Islands: islands rate only".
Under What to do, pick Hide the rates. Leave Which rates on The rate with exactly this name and write "Standard courier" in Value, the rate you are taking off.
Under When the rule applies, under Add the couriers' hard-to-reach areas, press Sicily, Sardinia and Small islands and the Venice lagoon. The postcodes land in the fields by themselves. The third button adds Livigno and Campione d'Italia too.
Write IT in Countries. The postcode conditions read the digits, not the country: without IT, a French 92100 falls between 90000 and 98999 too.
Check those postcodes against your courier's list before you ship. They are a starting point, nobody's price list.
For a range of your own use Postcodes from ... to ..., both ends included: Sardinia is 07000-09999. In Postcodes starting with, a prefix is enough: 9 for Sicily, 07, 08 and 09 for Sardinia. The same goes for both: keep IT in Countries, in the same rule.
Press Save the rule and try two carts, one for Palermo and one for Bologna. The first keeps only "Islands and remote areas", the second does not change.
What it does not do
The rule picks what the customer sees. The surcharge is a rate of your own, at the price you write.
It does not calculate shipping prices and it adds no surcharge by itself.
It does not use weight. The conditions are cart total, postcode, province, country and, on Pro, product tags and customer tags.
It prints no labels and it connects to no courier.
There is no reversed condition. You can say "for these postcodes", not "for every postcode but these".
Until the customer types an address there is no postcode, so the rule does nothing yet.
The free plan gives you three rules and conditions on the cart total. Postcodes and provinces start on Starter.
Next
The home page has more cases and the plans. If a rule does not fire on the postcode you expect, the support page says what to send us so we can see it.