Hide UPS Shipments (or other shipping methods) to PO Boxes”

Overview

UPS will allow you to ship to PO Box addresses but will charge you a fee and forward the package to a customer’s home address. This fee can be significant and should normally be avoided.

In ShipperHQ, you can restrict UPS so that it’s not shown for shipments to PO Boxes. Instead, you can have a carrier like USPS display.

Requirements

This example assumes that you’ve already set up a UPS carrier in ShipperHQ.

Setup

1. On the Shipping Rules page click the +New button
2. On the Basic tab, in the Shipping Rule Name field, give this rule a descriptive name (e.g. Hide UPS for PO Boxes)
3. Under the I want to…. section, set the action to “Hide a Shipping Method”
4. Scroll down to the For these shipping methods… section and assign the methods you wish to hide by selecting “Add Methods” (For this example it will be all UPS Shipping Methods)
5. Then, under Perform The Action When… select your Shipping Zone “US POBox” under Zones Include field.
6. Save and test your Shipping Rule

With the above Shipping Rule in place, UPS will not be shown if the customer enters a PO Box in the US as their address.

Magento: Setup Error Message

On the Magento platforms, when a rule is set to “Hide Shipping Methods” you can also set an error message that displays when the rule is in effect:

1. Check the “Show Error Message when this Rule Applies” box under the Advanced Tab (see screenshot below for reference)
2. Enter the error message you want to display.

Exceptions

If you don’t want to ship to PO Boxes at all, the configuration explained above will accomplish this for you.

If you want to offer USPS shipping but restrict it to only show for PO Boxes, you can achieve that via the Display Restrictions panel on the USPS Carrier directly.