 Now we are going to be talking about checkout settings and shipping zones. When you combine this lesson with the previous lesson your customers and your viewers will have a very smooth checkout process when trying to buy from your store which is exactly what we want. So on your Shopify dashboard go ahead and click on settings and then click on checkout. The first option that you want to look at is customer accounts. You can go ahead and leave it as disabled or you can go ahead and choose accounts are optional. I do not recommend to go with accounts are required because you don't want to tell your viewers hey you have to create an account on my website before you check out. Many do not want to create accounts they just want a simple and fast checkout process. Next you can choose if you want the customer to check out using either a phone number or email or by only using an email address. In my opinion the email address is more than enough but if they add phone numbers they will get order updates by SMS's and not just through emails. So go ahead and choose whatever is most comfortable for you here. I would go only with the email option because once again it's more than enough and it gets the job done. Next on the receive shipping updates go ahead and choose the first option the customer can choose to add a phone number or email to receive shipping updates after they complete their order instead of having them download an app to see what's going on and you have to be a US resident to use that so it's not comfortable for everyone so the first option is good. Next on the form options you should require a first and last name since you don't want any problems with the delivery process with the shipping company. On the company name you can leave it as hidden or as optional but definitely do not make it mandatory so either hidden or optional. Address line two should also be optional. Shipping address phone number is definitely not a must so you can go ahead and leave it as hidden and now you can go ahead and leave the rest of the options as default because they are good enough for what we need. So once we're done with that go ahead and click on save and that's it concerning the checkout settings. Now let's move on to the shipping zones. Back to the Shopify dashboard click on settings and then click on shipping and delivery. The reason that we need to create a shipping zone is to tell Shopify which countries we want to sell to and so that our viewers will be able to get free shipping or a shipping cost of whatever we want. So a shipping zone is a must so once you are here click on manage rates. Now here you'll notice on a default setting you are shipping from your local address which you have registered to Shopify with on your Shopify profile and you're also shipping to the same country that you're from and obviously this is not what we're here to do and this is exactly why we need to set these shipping zones so what you need to do now is open your settings in a new tab and here instead of using the default location we're going to go ahead and click on add location and this is going to be the name of the location where your products are shipping out from. So we're just going to go ahead and call it US warehouse. Now in the address field you're going to have to have an address a valid and real address from the US. Now to help you with this in the resources PDF that you have for this course there is a file over there with a whole bunch of US addresses in New York to help you out with these addresses so go ahead and copy any address for example this one 13 Washington square south pasted over here in the address and as you can see there's a drop down menu so go ahead and choose any address this way we'll know that it's valid and this way it also simplified the process it shows the correct city in the state of Massachusetts with the zip code and that's good enough let's go ahead and click on save and now we have a location which we can set our shipping zone from and have any resident in the US buy from our store so now let's head back to the shipping menu that we were on before now on the shipping from click on show details manage the one that's not relevant remove it and click on done now we have the address that we do want to use the US warehouse that we just created on the settings slash locations on the shipping zone we're going to click on the three dots and delete it the shipping to now we're going to create our own shipping zone so the zone name is going to be called ship to USA for example and in the country go ahead and add the United States click on done and now Shopify will allow anyone that's coming from the United States to our site they will have the add to cart and buy now options because we told Shopify that we want to ship to all of the 62 countries in the United States now we're going to click on add rate we're going to call it free shipping and the price is going to stay on zero dollars because we want to offer free shipping just as we are getting them from our suppliers go ahead and click on done so once again now everyone from the United States can buy products from your store because they will see the add to cart and buy now options anyone outside the United States can still go to your site they can still view your products and their prices but they will not have the add to cart and buy now options if you want to add those countries just add them in your shipping zone so once you save them that's all there is to it you have created your shipping zones so that's it when it comes to your checkout settings and your shipping zones this is exactly how you guys can get those two features done and now our viewers will have a very smooth checkout process without any problems or interruptions guys i'm really glad that you made it this far i know that the past couple of lessons were not the most interesting ones but you see how important they are to run your business smoothly and efficiently but don't worry you're going to love the next lesson your assignment for this lesson is to configure your checkout settings and your shipping zones and i'll see you in the next lesson where you will finally go live with your store you worked really hard up until now i'm proud of you and i'll see you in the next lesson where we are finally going to go live