01
We map what you actually need.
A single scoping call, then a written plan: what gets built, what it costs, and when it ships. No discovery-phase invoices, no moving targets.
WooCommerce · Shipping
Australia Post Rates Not Showing at Checkout? Here Is Why
Live Australia Post rates disappear from checkout for a small number of very specific reasons, and they are almost never the plugin being broken. Nearly every case we see comes down to a product missing a weight, a shipping zone that does not include the customer, or an API credential that was never finished.
Australian-based team
Fixed quote before we start
All prices in AUD
Senior developers only
Australian team
Based here, working your hours — not a timezone away
144+ projects delivered
Over 10+ years building and maintaining sites for Australian businesses
One developer, start to finish
The same person every time — no re-explaining your site
Straight answers, on your terms
We only take work we can finish. Ask us anything first — no obligation
Every product needs a weight and dimensions — every one
AusPost cannot quote on a parcel it cannot measure. If a single item in the cart has no weight, the rate request fails for the whole cart, not just that item. This is the most common cause by a distance, and it usually appears after someone adds a product in a hurry or imports a catalogue that did not carry the weight column.
Shipping zones that do not actually contain your customer
A zone covering Australia will not match a customer whose state is blank or whose postcode falls outside the ranges you entered. WooCommerce then falls through to whatever your catch-all zone offers, which is often nothing at all. Checking which zone a given address resolves to is the fastest way to confirm or eliminate this.
API keys, MyPost Business, and eParcel are not interchangeable
A retail AusPost account, a MyPost Business account and an eParcel contract expose different rate sets through different credentials, and a key issued for one will not return rates for another. Stores frequently have a key that works for the account type they used to have.
Box packing: what the plugin thinks it is shipping
Without box packing configured, many setups quote each item as its own parcel, which produces either absurd prices or no result at all for a large cart. With it configured badly, oversized items silently fail to fit any defined box and return nothing. This is the cause most often mistaken for a broken API.
Caching a rate response you did not mean to keep
Shipping rates are cached, sensibly, because the API is slow. The side effect is that a fix appears not to have worked, or an old failure keeps being served long after the cause was corrected. Any real diagnosis has to clear that cache between attempts, or you are testing yesterday.
When AusPost is simply refusing the request
Rate limits during a sale, a genuine outage, or a request for a destination the account is not contracted to serve will all return nothing. The right response is a sensible fallback rate so customers can still check out, rather than a checkout that offers no shipping at all and loses the order.
Australia Post rate questions
Rates show for some addresses but not others. Why?
That pattern almost always points at shipping zones or postcode ranges rather than the API — a working credential does not stop working for one postcode. It can also be a weight threshold, where heavier carts exceed what the selected service supports.
Should I just use flat rate shipping instead?
For some stores, honestly, yes, and we will say so. If your products are similar in size and weight, a well-chosen flat rate converts better than live rates and cannot break. Live rates earn their complexity when your catalogue varies enough that flat rate means losing money on big parcels or overcharging on small ones.
How long does this take to fix?
Most are resolved the same day once we can see the configuration — the causes above are quick to confirm or rule out. Fixed-quoted from $249 AUD, and if it turns out to be a missing weight on one product we will tell you that rather than invent work.
Get your shipping rates working
Tell us what is happening and we will come back with a fixed quote and a timeline, usually within one business day.
Get a fixed quote
