Integrating DHL services into WooCommerce is a great way to easily and efficiently manage all the shipping for your WordPress site. So in this article, we will talk about the ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label and what makes it the best free WooCommerce DHL shipping plugin.
WooCommerce Shipping Challenges:
WooCommerce is perhaps one of the best WordPress plugin available. It has a suite of tools and settings that help in configuring WordPress as an e-commerce site. This also includes shipping. While WordPress provides configurable Shipping Zones and classes, by which you can set up shipping for orders, it falls short. For starters, there is no support for International Shipping Carrier methods like DHL Express, etc. You cannot assign these methods to the Shipping Zones or Shipping Classes as well.
The DHL plugin helps alleviate these issues by providing a seamless integration of DHL services like Express, Paket and E-commerce.
Advantages of WooCommerce DHL Shipping:
Compared to other shipping carriers like FedEx and UPS, DHL has the definitive advantage. DHL helps simplify shipping greatly by providing a single point of contact for all your WooCommerce shipping. Moreover, DHL has an experienced International Help Desk for round the clock shipping support.
DHL also has more international hubs than it’s competition and can quite quote a shipment using only the package weight, country name, and dimensions.
ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label:
The ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label helps to seamlessly integrate DHL Express, DHL Paket and DHL E-commerce shipping services and products into WooCommerce. Using this plugin you can:
- Access real-time rates from DHL Express, DHL Paket and DHL Ecommerce.
- Print shipping as well as return labels.
- Print Archive Air Waybill and Commercial invoice.
- Track shipments.
- Pack items into custom boxes.
- Offer discounts or add a markup on shipping rates, with Price adjustments.
- Ensure packages with insurance amount.
- Generate bulk shipments and much more!
What’s more, the three DHL Services can be separately configured. You can access the settings from your WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Installed Plugins > ELEX DHL Shipping Plugin> DHL Express/DHL Paket/DHL Ecommerce.
1. Display Live Shipping Rates from DHL:
The plugin lets you choose to enable or disable the displaying of DHL Live Shipping rates on the cart page. Depending on the weight(automatically pulled from WooCommerce), the destination country and the sender country, the plugin sends an API request to DHL. The return live rates are then shown to the customer.
This lets the customer choose which service they want based on the shipping cost.
2. Enable WooCommerce DHL Shipping Insurance:
DHL has an unrivaled network of customs brokerage offices across the globe. Moreover, its efficient brokerage, clearance and compliance service is geared toward making the customs process simple. DHL not only moves your goods seamlessly across international borders but also ensures complete security and provides insurance against unforeseen events. 
What’s more, you can even select the countries that you wish to enable shipping insurance for.
3. Shipping Labels:
This plugin lets you enable or disable Shipping Labels. Using this feature you can generate Shipping Labels from the order Admin page. Disabling it will hide the label creation option.
What’s more, the plugin also comes with a slew of options to further customize shipping label generation. You can choose between 3 formats for the shipping labels: PDF Output, ZPL2 Output, and EPL2 Output.
The plugin also provides us with over 10 options for the printing size of shipping labels.
4. Show/Hide DHL Services:
ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label lets you choose to hide or show DHL services to customers.
The plugin lets us enable and configure estimated delivery times for each WooCommerce DHL shipping service available. You will have to choose the working days for your store in order for the delivery date calculation to work though.
You can also choose to enable or disable DHL account rates, display a break down of the charges or show only the Cheapest Rates to customers.
5. Shipping Services and Price Adjustments:
The plugin lets owners select and configure the shipping rates from DHL Express, DHL Paket, and DHL e-commerce as well.
From DHL Express you can pick from over 20 shipping services to enable for your store. Additionally, you can easily also fully configure the price of the service as well. The plugin allows for either increasing or decreasing the rates by a flat amount or by a percentage. 
This lets you account for surges in currency value, handling, and packaging costs as well as setup discounted prices for promotional sales. Moreover, shipping services from DHL E-commerce can be enabled and configured for WooCommerce in the same way.
6. Shipment Tracking:
Shipment tracking is an extremely nice feature to have if you’re an online retail store. Your customers can track their packages by themselves. The plugin also lets you enable or disable DHL shipment tracking.
The tracking number returned from DHL while generating the label would be added to order notes and will be sent as part of the order completion email. A visual representation of tracking status can be seen in Order edit page by Admin and in Order’s section of customer’s My-Account page. The tracking information shows the current status of the shipment in transit.
7. Parcel Packaging:
ELEX DHL plugin even lets you configure how your parcels are packaged. It comes with three options for this: 
- Pack items individually: This is the default method. Packs every item in the order into its own box. Moreover, you can pick the type of DHL box used to package the item. Standard DHL Boxes, DHL flyers and an option for choosing our own box are available.
- Pack into boxes with weights and dimensions: This packages all items in an order based on the item weights and dimensions. You need to provide the dimensions of the box that include the outer and inner height, length and width. What’s more, you can give the max weight of the box and set the package type as well.
- Weight-based: Using this option you can set heavier items to packaged first, or lighter items to be packaged first or pack purely divided by weight. This requires the Maximum Packing weight of the box to be entered.
8. Pickup Request:
The plugin allows you to place a parcel pickup request to DHL while creating shipments. You can specify the desired pickup day, time, and contact details. After successfully placing the pickup request, the store owner will get a unique booking number. This greatly simplifies the shipping process and is one of the major benefits of WooCommerce DHL shipping.
The DHL personnel will visit your store location, help you with the packaging if it’s needed and will ship it. Of course, WooCommerce stores that ship in large volume stand to benefit the most.
9. Bulk Printing Shipping Labels:
Using the addon you can simplify the process of generation shipping labels in bulk. The plugin uses the iLovePDF API to generate consolidated PDFs that contain multiple shipping labels. You can choose to orders you wish to be included in the consolidated PDF, by selecting the order IDs. 
Or you can also generate a consolidated Shipping label PDF for a date range that you can set. 
10. Auto Generate Email Notifications:
The DHL Express Auto-generate and Email labels Add-On automatically creates shipments, generate shipping labels, and sends email notifications with the shipping label, for you and your customers. This saves your time on manually generating shipping labels. 
Similarly, you can generate and mail DHL Express return labels as well.
Conclusion:
We have gone over the benefits of integrating DHL into WooCommerce and ten reasons why the ELEX WooCommerce DHL Express / eCommerce / Paket Shipping Plugin with Print Label is the best free WooCommerce DHL Shipping plugin. The free version of this plugin can be downloaded here and features:
- Access real-time rates from DHL Express service.
- DHL Estimated Delivery Times
- Breakdown charges for customers on the checkout page
- Option to show only DHL Account Rates,
- Limit DHL Express based on the destination country and more.
The premium version features Shipment Insurance, tracking, box packing options, and more WooCommerce DHL Shipping services. You can purchase the premium version here.
