What are Shipping Classes?

The idea of shipping classes is to make sure store owners are able to categorize their products based on the way they want to ship their products. For example, if your store ships heavy coffins as well as smaller urns, you have to make sure both types of products must ship accordingly. 

Hence, you can just create separate shipping classes for both types of products and define standard shipping for the smaller items and freight shipping for the heavier products. This way, it becomes easy and less time-consuming for the store owners to define shipping methods and shipping cost for their products. If you want to create separate shipping costs for different groups of products, such as, large items (framed paintings, skeletons, coffins etc) or for precious items (gold and silver jewellry), you will need to set up your shipping classes.

Shipping classes can be used to group products of similar type to provide different rates to different classes of product. They must be added after configuring shipping zones, and then added to a Flat Rate shipping method. 

Note: Shipping classes are used to group products – they are not used directly to offer shipping rates to customers.