The rules editor is a spreadsheet more than a settings page: cells you click to edit, rows you drag, a selection you act on in bulk, and nothing written to the database until you save. This page is the tour.
Editing cells
Click any cell to open its editor. Title and Note are plain text, edited in place. The rest open a small popover with Cancel and OK; pressing Enter is OK, Esc is Cancel, and clicking outside keeps the change if it is valid and discards it if it is not.
The Destination and Products editors are searchable lists. Start typing anywhere in the popover to filter, use the checkbox beside the search field to show only selected or only unselected entries, and switch between allow selected and deny selected to invert the meaning. Keyboard works throughout: ↑↓ move, Space toggles, Enter accepts.
A stale entry — a shipping class you deleted, a country you no longer ship to — is kept in the rule and marked with a warning icon reading This item no longer exists in the system. Deselect it to drop. The rule keeps working; untick the entry when you are sure you do not want it back.
Working with rows
The handle at the left of a row drags it up and down. Order matters only when a rule carries a mod, but a readable order — general rules at the bottom, exceptions at the top — makes a table much easier to revisit.
The checkbox column selects rules. Shift-click extends a selection, and the header checkbox takes all or none. With rules selected, the icons in the table header change from acting on the table to acting on the selection: duplicate, remove, and enable or disable.
Disabling is worth knowing about. A disabled rule stays in the table, greyed out, and is skipped entirely during evaluation. It is the safe way to test whether a rule is the one causing trouble, and a better way to retire a seasonal rate than deleting it. Whole tables can be disabled the same way, with the power icon in their header.
Selecting two rules, disabling them, and undoing it with Undo:
Saving, undo, and redo
Changes live in the browser until you press Save changes. The button appears once something has changed, and the same controls are mirrored in the sticky WooCommerce header so they stay reachable in a long table. Leaving the page with unsaved changes prompts you first.
Undo and Redo step through your edits, one action at a time, which makes experimenting cheap. They are a Pro edition feature.
Saving does one more thing worth knowing: it clears WooCommerce's shipping rate cache, so the next cart or checkout page reflects the new rules. Changing a product's weight does not clear that cache, which is why a price sometimes looks stale after a product edit — see Troubleshooting.
Copy and paste
Rules, whole tables, and entire configurations travel through the clipboard as JSON. Select some rules and press the copy icon; with nothing selected the same icon copies the table it belongs to. CtrlC copies every table on the screen at once. Paste with the paste icon or CtrlV into another table, another shipping zone, or another site entirely.
This is how you keep several zones in step without retyping, and how you move a price list from a staging site to production. It is a Pro edition feature.
Because the format is plain JSON, a copied configuration is also a backup: paste it into a text file and keep it. The step-by-step version lives in Export, import, copy shipping rules.
Keyboard shortcuts
Everywhere in the editor
CtrlS: save changes.
CtrlZ: undo, CtrlShiftZ: redo (Pro).
CtrlC / CtrlV: copy and paste rules or tables (Pro).
Enter: open the focused cell; Tab: move between cells.
Hovering a button for a moment shows its shortcut in the tooltip.
The Note column
The last column is free text that nothing reads — not the engine, not the customer. Use it to record the intent of a rule: which carrier price it mirrors, why a bracket ends where it does, when it should be revisited. A note written now is the difference between adjusting a price and reconstructing it.