Setting up shipping in WooCommerce is deceptively simple to start and deceptively easy to get wrong. WooCommerce ships with flat rate, free shipping, and local pickup built in at zero cost — for many small stores, that's genuinely all you need.
The cost enters once you need live carrier rates (UPS/USPS/FedEx shown at checkout), weight-based table rates, or complex multi-country logic. Setup for these ranges from $50 for a basic plugin to $500+ for custom developer logic.
The biggest mistake I see: one flat rate applied to wildly different product sizes. A $5.99 flat rate might work fine for a small accessory but silently lose $8-12 per order the moment a bulky item ships — a loss that's easy to miss until you compare a month of shipping receipts against what was actually charged.
Full breakdown with setup steps and a real client example: https://amanurrahman.com/blog-post/woocommerce-shipping-cost