“Shipping” in Commerce 1 meant “get shipping rates.” End of story. If you wanted to do something crazy like actually receive the item or put it in a box in the warehouse, you were out of luck. You could integrate with another system, but otherwise, you were really just a storefront.

But Commerce 2.x is a different story. Now you can go from getting rates all the way down to actually receiving the shipment.

Some background

With Commerce 1, we realized we had shipping that didn’t do anything other than giving rates (and if you have free shipping, you don’t even care about that). So we set out to fix that in Commerce 2.x.

Shipping is actually a pretty complicated process. Once someone purchases a product, how does it actually get to them? You need to print off labels that have barcodes and will work for UPS and FedEx, and any other delivery service you plan to use. You have to know what boxes to put stuff in, what goes in what box, what gets shipped out from what location, etc.

Commerce 2.x now has a nice shipments API that can handle everything.

New functionality

Everything has a plugin interface now. Take packing, for example. You can have a packing algorithm that is really simple — everything goes into a theoretical box of infinite size. Or the algorithm can be more complicated — you can say these things can’t get packed with this, or these things are chairs, so they stack a certain way.

For every step of the shipping process (getting rates, printing labels, making packing slips, and so on), you can use the functionality that’s now built into Commerce 2.x, or you can replace any or all of those pieces with other providers. That could be delivery services like FedEx or UPS, or it could be some third-party shipping provider that handles the boxing, or it could be Amazon if you do your fulfillment through them.

The bottom line

Shipping in Commerce 2.x now covers the whole flow of shipping, from ordering to having the package arrive at someone’s house. It’s a massive improvement over Commerce 1, which only gave the rates.

To learn more, check out our High Five episode “Drupal Commerce 2.x—Shipping.”

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