What’s new in Australia Post WooCommerce Extension Pro 3.0

3.0 is the fourth major release of the Australia Post WooCommerce Extension Pro plugin. The main new feature in this release is the ability to connect to Australia Post contract prices and eParcel. And since a month ago, we are an official platform partner of Australia Post. That means that integrating the plugin with Australia Post Shipping & Tracking API requires a minimum effort when you choose WPRuby as your Platform Partner.

Labels Pro and Pro

We decided to build two versions of the plugin, and these two versions have different prices. We did this split mainly because many of our customers do not have a contract with Australia Post and they will not need the Labels feature and make them pay the full price is not fair for them. So at the moment, the Pro plugin starts at 49$US and the Labels Pro starts at 69$US. And of course, you can upgrade to Labels Pro at any time.

There is one major difference between the two versions, Labels Pro contain all of the Pro features and also, the ability to create orders, labels, and display of contract prices. And even if you do not offer Australia Post prices to your customers, e.g. Free Shipping, Flat Rate. You still can use the plugin to generate Australia Post labels.

So what’s new?

Pro

1. Complete refactoring – We rewrote the plugin to work on the latest features of PHP and to make it extendible and modular. This will allow us to add more features easily in the future and to keep the plugin well-maintained.
2. The plugin has a global settings page now, some settings were not fitting the shipping zones settings as you would need to repeat configuration every time you assign Australia Post to a zone. So we migrated some settings to a global settings page.
3. The International Express option was not supporting Signature on Delivery, and with 3.0 the customers can choose Signature on Delivery for International Express.
4. Letters packing calculations are based on the BoxPacker algorithm now, meaning that letters packing has more accurate estimations.
5. At the settings page of the plugin, we added more links from the Knowledgebase, this is important for self-service if you want to be informed about Troubleshoots, your license management, and so on.

Labels Pro

1. All of what was mentioned in the Pro section applies to Labels Pro as well.
2. A new Labels Printer box at the order page.
3. International Labels were not working due to the missing required clearance information. This is fixed now as you can provide this information for International Orders.
4. Order Summaries – We built a page where you can select the shipments of the day and create Australia Post order with the selected shipments, and download the Order Summary document at any time.
5. You can now choose the Label Layout: A6 Thermal or A4 (1, 2, 3 or 4) labels per page.
6. When you add your Australia Post credentials, you can now verify that they are correct by clicking on the Verify button under the password field.
7. The contract postage products names by default are in capital letter and they are not the nicest presentation for your customers, so we introduced the ability to change their names in the Custom Titles option.
8. You can also enable/disable certain postage products at any time from the Enabled Contract Options setting.

We are in the process to update all of the documentation of the plugin, and we already wrote a guide on how to generate labels and shipping order: [Labels Pro] How to print labels and create shipping orders.

Useful documentation articles:

• Australia Post Global Settings
• Australia Post Zone Settings
• [Labels Pro] How to connect Labels Pro with your Australia Post account
• [Labels Pro] Label Printing & Contracted Prices Credentials