Defining Regional Geographical Areas

Just like the country list, lists of smaller geographical units (states, counties, provinces or regions) are used for the purpose of defining shipping and taxation schemes and calculations. They are also used in the registration form at the Customer Zone. To access the list of states or regions of a particular country, select the 'States' section from the 'Settings' menu and select the country from a drop-down list (Figure 3-21). Using this screen you can edit state definitions, add new states and delete unnecessary ones.

Note: At the time of LiteCommerce installation you can choose to automatically populate your store database with regional information for the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom (see the section "LiteCommerce web installation" for details). For other countries you have to populate the geographical data manually by adding its states, counties, provinces or regions.

You can edit state codes and names by typing new values in the corresponding fields and clicking on the 'Update' button to save your changes.

To add a new state for the country, fill in the 'Add new state' form and click on the 'Add new' button.

To delete a state, place a checkmark in the checkbox to the right from the state definition and click on the 'Delete selected' button. You can delete several states at once.

After the lists of country states, provinces, regions and counties have been populated, you can create shipping zones (groups of countries or smaller geographical units) which you will use to define shipping settings. Country and state lists are also used in tax definitions.

Figure 3-21: Reviewing the list of Canadian provinces