Occasionally companies will contact us looking for a way to manage shipping with multiple locations. That can be tricky to set up. The drop shipping options are built around a location having a specific product to be shipped. If you order a white mug, it comes from Toledo. Blue mugs come from St. Louis. They aren’t engineered to have the same product available from multiple warehouses.

But for companies who are doing local delivery only, like a florist or restaurant, there is a ready-made option called Local Pickup Plus. This extension is designed so that customers place an order and then select a brick and mortar location to come and pick it up. The customer can select from options in a drop-down menu or they can use geolocation from Google Maps to find the nearest option.

It is possible to use this setup for delivery instead with a few small tweaks. This option only works if you are giving free or flat rate shipping. It won’t be possible to pull rates from an API like the USPS Shipping Method does. You can use it alongside Per Product Shipping.

As an example, I created a fictitious florist with a few products to work with and then installed Local Pickup Plus. You’ll notice new options under Shipping for “Local Pickup Plus” and “Pickup Locations.” Let’s take a look at the settings under “Local Pickup Plus.”

The “Title” here is what will be shown next to any shipping charge you add. It made sense to just call it a “Delivery fee” but you can select anything you want. Below that are some options on packing orders and lastly a spot where you can add a default price adjustment. This could be a discount, but most likely in our situation it will be a fee.

After that it’s time to add our locations. You can do that by gong to “Pickup Locations” in your shipping settings.

The “Title” here is the name that will appear in the drop-down menu where the user selects a store location to order from. There are tabs where you can refine this by setting products available at this location, charging extra for shipping from here, and adding email addresses of those that should be notified when an order is placed here.

Repeat that for all your locations. Let’s take a look at our checkout now. So far we have a line for the “Delivery fee” we added in earlier as well as a drop-down menu for our locations. But we have a notification saying that this order is for pickup. We don’t need that. Also there is no option to set a delivery address!

We can fix both of these with a bit of CSS. Go to Appearance > Customize in your Dashboard and click on Additional CSS. In the box there, add this snippet:

#wc-local-pickup-plus-toggle-default-handling,
.woocommerce-shipping-destination {
	display: none;
}

#ship-to-different-address,
.shipping_address {
	display: block !important;
}

What that will do is hide the notice saying items are for pickup and turn on display of the shipping address. Now our checkout looks like this:

That’s an improvement, but it says “Pickup Location” next to our store drop-down menu. Since this is for delivery we don’t want to confuse our customers so this needs to be changed. Unfortunately there isn’t an option in the extension’s settings to change this so we’ll have to do it another way. The easiest method to change text “strings” like this is by using a translation plugin like Loco Translate.

If you haven’t done this before I have a guide to using Loco Translate in WooCommerce to do this exact thing. We’ll want to search for the “Pickup Location” string. Notice that there is no colon at the end. We want to make sure we pick the right text to change. I altered it to say “Store location” and this is the result.

So now my customers can add the flowers they want delivered and select the location closest to the shipping address. A fee will be added and after the order is placed, an email notification will be sent to that location’s email address so the order can be processed and delivered.

Now we’ve seen that if you’re a business with local delivery you can use Local Pickup Plus and make it work for your specific situation. If you’ve used Local Pickup Plus in a creative way, let us know in the comments below!