Customer Delivery Preferences

Manages options that empower the customer to control delivery timing and instructions.

Enables customer-selected ship and delivery dates and special delivery notes.

Shipping Address Behavior

Controls the validation, display, and required nature of shipping address fields.

Defines accepted address formats (residential vs. commercial) and built-in city/state/zip validation rules.

Shipping Estimates and Method Visibility

Determines when shipping cost estimates appear and which shipping methods are visible to the customer.

Controls display of estimated shipping costs and logic for hiding or showing specific carriers or methods.

Fulfillment Behavior

Governs how the shipping process interacts with your fulfillment system and warehouse logic.

Manages order split rules and fulfillment-related data passed to third-party logistics.

Cost and Risk Configuration

Deals with the financial aspects of shipping, including insurance, handling, and risk assessment.

Configures automatic shipping insurance and surcharge rules based on cost or value.

Automatic Geo Location

Manages the system's ability to automatically determine a customer's location for early tax and shipping estimates.

Enables IP-based location detection to provide accurate tax and shipping calculations before the customer enters their address.

Smarty Streets Address Verification

Optional premium integration for full address standardization during checkout.

Verifies the complete shipping address against USPS delivery data, offers corrections to customers, and optionally enables server-side address autocomplete.

Allow Customers to select ship date

Enables customers to specify a desired ship date during checkout. Can be set as required or left empty by default.

Allow customer to select delivery date

Enables customers to specify a desired delivery date during checkout. UltraCart will check whether the selected shipping method can meet this date and notify the customer if it cannot. Can be set as required or left empty by default.

Default Shipping to Residential Address

When customers are given the option to specify a residential or business shipping address, enabling this sets the default to Residential. Customers can still change it to Business if applicable.

Force Shipping to Residential Address

Removes the Business Address option from checkout entirely. Useful for merchants who prefer not to ship to business addresses due to potential carrier surcharges.

Use this carrier to determine residential address flag

When selected, UltraCart queries the specified carrier (e.g., FedEx) to determine whether an address is residential, rather than relying on what the customer selects during checkout.

Loose P.O. Box restriction check

By default, UltraCart's P.O. Box check looks for "P" at the beginning of the address and "box" anywhere within it. Enabling this loose check treats an address as not a P.O. Box if it contains "box" but also has an entry in Address Line 2. This helps prevent issues with carriers like UPS and FedEx, which do not deliver to true P.O. Boxes.

Disable U.S.P.S. Address Standardization

Controls UltraCart's built-in city/state/zip validation. When unchecked (the default), UltraCart uses Geocodio to verify that the city, state, and zip code entered by the customer form a valid combination. This validation runs silently — it does not prompt the customer to modify their address and does not process the street address. Check this box only if you want to disable this background validation entirely. For full address standardization that prompts the customer to accept a corrected address, see Smarty Streets Address Verification.

Hide Special Instructions

Hides the Special Instructions text box from the checkout page. By default, customers can use this field to leave delivery notes for the carrier (for example, "leave package on back porch").

Maximum Special Instructions Length

Sets a character limit on the Special Instructions field to prevent overly long entries from distorting shipping labels. Has no effect if Special Instructions is hidden.

Address Line Character Limit

The default address line length is 32 characters. This can be increased up to 50 characters. Confirm that your shipping software or fulfillment partner can support longer address fields before increasing this value.

Hide Estimates on View Cart

By default, UltraCart displays shipping estimates in the shopping cart. Enable this to suppress estimates from appearing before the customer reaches checkout.

Display Estimates by Carrier and then Cost

Groups shipping estimates by carrier name (e.g., UPS, FedEx) and then sorts by cost within each carrier.

Send no shipping methods email

Sends an email notification to the merchant when UltraCart cannot find any available shipping methods for a customer's order. The notification includes the Item ID(s), quantity, and shipping address to help with troubleshooting.

Hold Split Shipments in Accounts Receivable

If an order incorrectly indicates a split shipment — meaning items are not configured to ship from multiple distribution centers — enabling this places the order on hold in Accounts Receivable. This provides an opportunity to adjust distribution center assignments and shipping costs before payment processing.

Prevent attempt to single source order from one distribution center

By default, UltraCart tries to source all items from a single distribution center, even when items in another DC are physically closer to the customer. This typically results in lower shipping costs. Enabling this setting discourages single-DC sourcing. Review the potential impact on shipping costs before enabling.

Insurance Percentage if COGS not specified

In the Item Editor, if the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) field is left blank, the percentage entered here is applied for shipping insurance calculation purposes.

Use Geo-Location

Leverages a third-party database to estimate shipping costs more accurately by mapping the customer's IP address to a physical location. Enables early, accurate shipping and tax estimates before the customer has entered their address. There is no additional charge for this feature.

Default initial country on shopping cart

When enabled, the country field in the shopping cart automatically pre-fills with the country identified by the customer's geo-located IP address.

Enable Smarty Streets address verification

Activates the integration. All other settings in this section require this to be checked.

Auth ID

Your Smarty Streets Auth ID. Type a new value to replace the masked stored credential.

Auth Token

Your Smarty Streets Auth Token. Type a new value to replace the masked stored credential.

Verify the shipping address at checkout

When enabled, UltraCart submits the customer's shipping address to Smarty Streets for verification during checkout.

Offer the corrected address as a suggestion

When a discrepancy is found, the customer is shown the Smarty Streets-corrected address and given the option to accept it. If unchecked, verification runs silently without customer interaction.

When the customer will not provide a verified address

Controls what happens if the customer declines a corrected address or their address cannot be verified. Options include allowing the order to proceed or blocking it until a valid address is provided.

Enable address autocomplete

Enables server-side address autocomplete as the customer types in the shipping address fields. No embedded client-side API key is required — all requests are proxied through UltraCart's servers.

Monthly autocomplete request limit

Sets a cap on the number of autocomplete requests sent to Smarty Streets per month. Enter 0 for unlimited. Useful for controlling API costs.

Monthly verification request limit

Sets a cap on the number of address verification requests sent to Smarty Streets per month. Enter 0 for unlimited.