Zones & Subzones

Zones define where you ship to. They’re synced from your Shopify shipping zones automatically.

How zones sync

When you install ShipRules AI, it reads your Shopify shipping zones and creates matching zones in the app. Each zone contains a list of countries (as ISO codes like “US”, “CA”, “AU”).

If you change your Shopify shipping zones later (add or remove countries), ShipRules AI picks up the changes on the next sync.

Note

You cannot create or delete zones inside ShipRules AI. Zones always come from Shopify. To ship to a new country, add it to a shipping zone in your Shopify admin first.

Subzones

Subzones let you target specific postal code ranges within a zone. This is useful for:

• Remote area surcharges — postal codes in rural areas
• Metro vs. regional pricing — different rates for city vs. countryside
• State-level targeting — group postal codes by state or province

How subzones work

A subzone belongs to a zone and contains a comma-separated list of postal codes or postal code patterns:

• Exact codes: 2000,2001,2002
• Wildcards: 20* (matches 2000-2099)
• Ranges: 2000-2999

When a customer checks out, ShipRules AI first matches their destination to a zone (by country), then checks if any subzone matches their postal code. If a subzone matches, the shipping methods and rules for that subzone apply instead of the general zone rules.

Example: Australian metro vs. regional

Zone: Australia (AU)
  ├── Subzone: Metro (2000-2099, 3000-3207, 4000-4179, 5000-5099, 6000-6199)
  └── Subzone: Regional (everything else)

You’d create separate shipping methods for Metro and Regional, each with different rates.

Caution

Subzones are available on the Pro and Enterprise plans. Starter plan stores use zones without subzone targeting.

Zone matching at checkout

When a rate request comes in, ShipRules AI matches the destination country against your zones. The matching is straightforward:

1. Find the zone that contains the destination country code.
2. If the zone has subzones, check if the destination postal code matches any subzone.
3. Evaluate the shipping methods for the matched zone (and subzone, if any).

If no zone matches the destination, no ShipRules AI rates are returned for that checkout.