Guide
How to add Australia Post shipping rates to WooCommerce
WooCommerce ships with flat rate, free shipping and local pickup. It has no Australia Post option. Here are the three ways to get Australia Post prices in front of your customers, from no plugin at all to live quotes.
Option 1: Flat rates copied from the Australia Post calculator
This needs no plugin. Go to Australia Post's postage calculator, price your most common parcel to a handful of destinations (same city, same state, interstate, WA or NT if you are on the east coast), and set up WooCommerce shipping zones with flat rates that cover those cases.
In WooCommerce go to Settings › Shipping › Zones. Create a zone per state or group of states, add a Flat rate method to each and enter the figure. You can add a weight-based twist using shipping classes: give heavy products a class and add a per-class surcharge in the flat rate cost field.
Where it falls down: parcel prices depend on weight, size and distance between zones. A flat rate overcharges the customer two suburbs away and undercharges the one in Broome. Every price change by Australia Post means re-doing the sums. It is fine for a store with one product size and a tolerance for losing a few dollars on some orders.
Option 2: Table rate shipping by weight and state
A table rate plugin lets you set a grid: destination zone down the side, weight bands across the top, price in each cell. You build the grid from Australia Post's published rates. This is closer to reality than flat rates and works offline, with no API.
The work is in keeping the table current and in choosing how many bands to use. Australia Post prices parcels per 500 g and by zone pairs, so an accurate table for all of Australia is large. Most stores settle on five or six weight bands and four or five destination groups and accept some rounding.
This is also the right approach if you only ever ship prepaid satchels. Satchel prices are fixed per size regardless of destination, so a small table by weight band is exact. See the satchel guide.
Option 3: Live rates from the Australia Post API
Australia Post publishes a free Postage Assessment Calculator (PAC) API. Give it an origin postcode, a destination postcode, the parcel's weight and dimensions, and it returns the retail price for each service: Parcel Post, Express Post, and international services when you send a country code instead of a postcode.
A plugin that uses the API asks for a quote at cart and checkout, so the customer sees the real price for their postcode and the actual weight of what they bought. You never update a table. When Australia Post changes prices, the quotes change with them.
To use it you need three things:
- A PAC API key. Registration is free at developers.auspost.com.au. Our key guide has the steps.
- A weight on every product. The API prices by weight, so a product with no weight gets quoted at nothing.
- A box size. The API needs dimensions. Most plugins let you set one default box and pack by weight; better ones let you define several boxes and pick the smallest that fits.
Things to look for in an API plugin:
- A fallback rate. If Australia Post's API is slow or down, the checkout should still show a price rather than "no shipping methods available".
- Caching. The same parcel to the same postcode should not need a fresh API call every time the customer changes quantity.
- Markup or discount. The API returns retail prices. If you pay MyPost Business rates you may want to shave a percentage; if you want to recover packaging, add a handling fee.
- Block checkout support. Newer WooCommerce stores use the block-based cart and checkout. The plugin needs to register its rates in a way the blocks understand.
- Licence model. The official extension is A$159 a year. Others are free with an annual upsell. Work out the three-year cost, not the first-year cost.
Which one should you use?
One product, one parcel size, happy to round: flat rates by state. Satchels only: a small weight table. Anything else, or any product range where weight varies: the API. The setup time is about the same as a table and you never maintain it.
If you would rather not set this up by hand, Ratehaul Lite does the API work for free, and Pro adds satchel pricing, box packing and international rates for A$59 once.
Ratehaul is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Australia Post.