How to Set Up Chit Chats Shipping on WooCommerce

TL;DR

• Set up Chit Chats on WooCommerce entirely from WP-CLI: API credentials, origin address, shipping zones, boxes, services, and rate adjustments.
• The namespace is wc-chitchats-shipping. Confirm it with wp help | grep shipping.
• Chit Chats credential keys are not the same as other carriers. Run wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings list to discover the exact keys (clientId / accessToken and their test variants) before you write anything.
• Audit your catalog for missing weight and dimensions, size your boxes, then prove rates come back with a real rates quote to a US address. A quote that returns rates is the only proof the carrier is reachable.
• Enable the US-Bound and International services to surface the cross-border savings; turn on the matching domestic Canada services if you also ship within Canada.
• Install the free agent skill and an assistant like Claude Code runs the whole sequence for you.

$ npx skills add https://github.com/1TeamSoftware/skills --skill 1teamsoftware-wc-shipping

What the official Chit Chats integration does and doesn’t do

The official Chit Chats WooCommerce app is order-import only. It pulls completed orders into the Chit Chats dashboard so you can buy postage there. That handles fulfillment and nothing else. The shopper at checkout gets no Chit Chats rate, because none ever reaches the cart. Generic Canada-shipping plugins like PluginHive, ELEX, and Octolize wire up Canada Post or other carriers, but none of them speak Chit Chats, so you land back on two systems.

The missing piece is the rate at checkout. If your store can’t quote a Chit Chats price to the cart, no command will produce one for you. The 1TeamSoftware plugin closes that gap. It calls the Chit Chats API in real time, shows Select, US-Bound, and International rates at checkout, and prints the label one click later inside WooCommerce. The rest of this guide assumes that plugin.

Two prerequisites before you start. You need a Chit Chats account (it’s the carrier; sign up at chitchats.com and generate API credentials), and you need the plugin installed. From there setup runs about ten minutes.

What you can do from the command line

Every command follows one shape: wp <namespace> <command> [<subcommand>] [--flags]. For Chit Chats the namespace is wc-chitchats-shipping, and it’s the same for the free and PRO editions. Run wp help | grep shipping first to confirm it’s registered.

The command list won’t tell you the exact setting keys. Chit Chats authenticates with clientId and accessToken (plus test variants), which is not what Shippo or FedEx use, so discover the keys instead of guessing. settings list shows the real keys with secrets redacted, services shows valid service IDs, and boxes presets shows carrier box dimensions.

The commands below are a working set, not the whole surface. For every command, flag, and output shape, see the full WP-CLI command reference.

Status, validation, and capabilities

Start here to check what the plugin sees and whether the config holds up.

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping status --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping validate
License Status         PASS    License is activated
Ship From              PASS    From Address configured
Product Dimensions     WARN    Only 27% of products have valid dimensions
Cart Rates             PASS    Rates working: 4/4 routes, 15 rate(s) total
Shipping Services      PASS    7 service(s) available
Shipping Zones         PASS    Using global shipping rates
Sandbox Mode           INFO    Sandbox mode is active
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping features
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping services --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping zones

• status prints the plugin version and carrier, the sandbox and debug flags, whether live rates are on, your origin, and how many method instances exist. It won’t tell you if the API is reachable; for that you run a rates quote.
• validate walks every config check and labels each one PASS, FAIL, WARN, INFO, or PENDING. A single FAIL drops the exit code to non-zero, which lets you block a release until your Chit Chats cross-border setup checks out.
• features lists Chit Chats capability flags (labels, returns, tracking, address validation, and so on). These are capabilities, not service IDs.
• services lists the real Chit Chats service IDs and their enabled status. This is the list you set, not features.
• zones shows which WooCommerce shipping zones the plugin is attached to, with plugin_active, instance_id, and method_id per zone.

Settings

Use these to read and write any stored setting, from credentials to origin.

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings list
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings get origin
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings set origin '{"name":"Co","address":"215 Spadina Ave","city":"Toronto","state":"ON","postcode":"M5T 2C7","country":"CA"}'

settings list is your map. It prints every setting with sensitive values shown as [REDACTED], and it’s the right way to discover the Chit Chats credential keys before you set them. Associative settings flatten with bracket notation (origin[city], services[...][enabled]); list settings like boxes print as a raw JSON blob. Read one value with settings get <key> (add --raw to reveal a secret), write one with settings set <key> <value>, and target a single zone with --instance=<id>.

Product readiness

Run these to find out whether your catalog has the weight and dimension data rates depend on. For Chit Chats it matters more than usual: the savings live in the light parcel band, and weight drives the rate.

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products audit --detailed --format=json --limit=0
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products stats --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products orders --since=2025-12-01 --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products fit-box --length=12 --width=8 --height=6

• products audit gives a completeness percentage and flags missing weight, missing dimensions, and suspicious values. The per-product lists only appear with --format=json; in table mode --detailed shows the same summary as plain audit. Pass --limit=0 so big catalogs aren’t capped at 500.
• products stats returns weight and dimension stats, a size distribution from tiny to oversized, and the top items by volume.
• products orders analyzes completed and processing orders: items per order, top destination states, domestic versus international, and the largest multi-item orders by item count. The domestic-versus-international split tells you how much of your volume actually crosses the border.
• products fit-box takes box dimensions (all three required) and reports what percentage of your catalog fits, with a sample of products that don’t. Rotation is handled automatically.

Rates

Rates are the reason Canadian sellers reach for Chit Chats. These two commands confirm the carrier returns live prices for a product or an order.

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping rates quote --products="9405:2" --destination="500 5th Ave, New York, NY 10001, US"
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping rates get --order=12345

• rates quote asks Chit Chats for a live quote on an ad-hoc product and destination. It needs at minimum a ZIP or postcode plus a country; a full street address improves accuracy. Quote to a US destination to see the cross-border rate the way a US shopper would. This is the connectivity proof. It prints a human log line before the JSON, so when you script it, extract the JSON array from the first [ to the matching ] rather than relying on 2>/dev/null.
• rates get quotes an existing order by ID.

Fulfillment commands (PRO)

These cover fulfillment once a license is active: packing, buying labels, tracking shipments.

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping boxes presets
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping shipments create --orders=1240,1241
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels purchase --orders=1240,1241
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels pdf --orders=1240,1241 --output=/var/labels/today.pdf
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping track abc123 --order=1240 --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping manifest create --shipments=abc123,def456 --ship-date=2026-06-11
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping license activate YOUR-KEY

• boxes is PRO only. boxes presets returns carrier box dimensions already converted to your store units; boxes types reads the carrier’s package-type catalog and needs configured credentials.
• shipments create/list/get/fetch give you manual control over shipments before you spend on postage.
• labels purchase buys labels in a batch and auto-creates shipments if missing. labels pdf merges many orders into one print-ready PDF; labels download and labels refund handle single labels. Note that labels purchase logs label counts, not tracking numbers.
• track returns status plus the event timeline; it needs both the positional shipment ID and --order.
• manifest create builds a carrier manifest from shipment IDs you list explicitly.
• license activate takes the key as a positional argument, not --key=. On the PRO plugin, license, boxes, and status are always available; the operational commands appear once the license is active.

These commands ship with the PRO version. If you fulfill Chit Chats orders from WooCommerce and want labels, batch printing, tracking, and manifests on the same CLI, the ChitChats Shipping PRO plugin adds them.

One note on --format. The status, validate, features, services, zones, and rates commands take the whole table|json|csv|yaml|count range. The products subcommands, boxes, track, and settings list are limited to table|json, and they error out on anything else.

Hand it to an AI agent

Install the skill once and an assistant like Claude Code drives every command above from plain language. The skill is a small library of playbooks, not a wrapper, so when you ask it to fix box coverage it reaches for the box-sizing routine instead of guessing at flags. It runs the same CLI a human would and pauses to ask for secrets rather than inventing them. That last part matters when the secret is a carrier key.

$ npx skills add https://github.com/1TeamSoftware/skills --skill 1teamsoftware-wc-shipping

The free plugin ships 6 skills; PRO adds 4. After installing, describe what you want with real constraints. These are the kinds of prompts the skill is built to handle:

• “Set up Chit Chats from scratch. Here’s my sandbox credential. We ship from our Toronto warehouse. Before live rates, show me which credential fields this carrier actually uses, audit my catalog for missing weight or dimensions, recommend a starter box set from what I actually sell, and prove a US-Bound rate comes back with a real quote to a New York address. Ask me one question at a time and don’t touch my live credential yet.”
• “Rotate our Chit Chats credentials to the new live token. First show me which fields this carrier uses, set them, confirm the old secret is gone, and verify with a live quote before we trust it.”
• “I only want to offer the US-Bound and International Chit Chats services, plus domestic Canada. List the real service IDs this carrier exposes, enable exactly those, disable the rest, and show me the enabled list when you’re done.”
• “Customers in the US say no shipping options appear. Make Chit Chats active for my US zone and Rest of World, then show me the zone coverage table so I can confirm it’s attached where it needs to be.”
• “My lightest parcels should be the cheapest, but the box packing is quoting them in oversized boxes. Analyze my orders and catalog and recommend a box set that keeps light cross-border parcels in the right size band, and show me coverage before applying.”
• “We’re going live this week. Confirm the license is active, set our live credentials and origin, audit and fix product data, build a box set, confirm Chit Chats supports label purchase and tracking, then buy a test label in sandbox and pull tracking on one order so I can see the whole pipeline first.”

Real use cases

Light parcels missing weight, so the cross-border rate never shows

This one quietly costs Canadian sellers the most. The Chit Chats advantage lives in the sub-1kg band, and the rate is driven by weight. A product with no weight gets nothing back from the carrier, the US shopper sees no option, and you never find out why. Missing product data is among the most common reasons a quote comes back empty.

You’d ask the agent something like: “Audit every physical product for missing weight and dimensions, give me the completeness percentage and the full list of what’s incomplete (don’t cap it, I have a big catalog), then research real specs from manufacturer sources, apply only high-confidence values to the parent and every variation in my store’s units, and list the rest for me to confirm by hand. Never make up a number.”

What runs:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products audit --detailed --format=json --limit=0

The agent reads the missing_weight_products, missing_dimensions_products, and suspicious_data_products arrays, researches the real specs, converts them to your woocommerce_weight_unit and dimension_unit, and writes them with wp wc product update to the parent and each variation. It applies only high-confidence values and hands you the low-confidence and not-found ones to confirm.

Edge cases it respects: virtual and downloadable products drop out of the audit on their own; variations pull weight and dimensions from the parent, so a fix lands on both; and the audit flags a value as suspicious once a weight climbs past roughly 70 lb (32 kg) or a single dimension runs over roughly 72 in (183 cm). A spec it can’t verify stays blank rather than getting guessed.

You end up with a higher completeness percentage, light parcels that finally quote, and a short list of genuine unknowns to settle yourself.

Pick the boxes that keep parcels in the cheap weight band

Rates can look high for a dull reason: parcels get quoted in oversized boxes because nobody matched the box set to what the store ships. For a Chit Chats store that bites harder, because a too-big box can push a 250g parcel past the threshold where the savings live.

You’d ask: “Analyze my last 6 months of orders and my catalog, recommend a box set that covers about 90% of what I ship, keep light cross-border items in tight boxes, show me the coverage table before applying anything, and keep my existing custom boxes.”

What runs:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products stats --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products orders --since=2025-12-01 --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping boxes presets --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping products fit-box --length=12 --width=8 --height=6
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings set boxes '[{"enabled":"yes","boxName":"Small","type":"parcel","length":"8","width":"6","height":"4","weight":"0.3","maxweight":"5"}]'

products stats and products orders describe the real shapes and carts. The preset output won’t drop into the setting unchanged, so the agent translates each field from boxes presets into the boxes schema before writing it: rename name to boxName, add an enabled flag, strip out carrier and maxweight. It tests candidate boxes with products fit-box, shows you a coverage table, then applies the merged set with settings set boxes. With no order history it falls back to catalog-only and tells you so.

You get a box set sized to your catalog, with light parcels kept small so they hold the rate band that makes Chit Chats worth it. (boxes presets is PRO; on a free install you write the boxes setting directly with the free settings set boxes command.)

No US rates at checkout: shipping zones

This failure hides well. Rates work for some customers and not others, so you only hear about it when a US buyer emails to say they can’t check out. The plugin returns rates only on zones where it’s attached as a shipping method. If Chit Chats isn’t on your US or Rest of World zone, the cross-border shoppers the carrier is built for hit a dead end.

You’d ask: “rates quote works from the CLI but US checkout shows nothing. Figure out which zone those addresses fall into, check whether Chit Chats is actually attached, and add it where it’s missing.”

What runs:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping zones
$ wp wc shipping_zone_method create --zone_id=2 --method_id=wc-chitchats-shipping --user=1

zones shows each zone’s plugin_active, instance_id, and method_id. Where it reads plugin_active: no on the US zone, the method gets added. If you run zone-based shipping, a US zone that has no Chit Chats method attached quotes nothing to American shoppers; if you run a single global rate table instead, that attachment gap never bites. Once attached, you can set per-zone overrides with --instance, so your US zone runs US-Bound services while your Canada zone runs the domestic ones, with your global defaults left alone.

Now the plugin is present on the right zones and US checkout returns rates.

Enable only the Chit Chats services you actually sell

Chit Chats exposes several services: Select for domestic Canada, US-Bound for the cross-border injection, International, and more. Show all of them at checkout and the shopper drowns in options. Show the wrong ones and you quote lanes you don’t run.

You’d ask: “List the real Chit Chats service IDs this carrier exposes, enable US-Bound and International plus domestic Canada, disable the rest, and show me the enabled list when you’re done.”

What runs:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping services --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings set services '{"...":{"enabled":true}}'
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping services

Discover the exact IDs with services first, write them with settings set services as a keyed object (not an array), then re-run services to confirm the enabled flags. Never invent service IDs; a carrier only quotes the ones it exposes. You can also rename services so a shopper sees “USA Tracked, 5 to 8 days” instead of carrier jargon.

The result: only the lanes you run quote at checkout, named in plain English.

Buy a test label before going live

Watch the full fulfillment pipeline run once in sandbox before real customers ever touch it.

You’d ask: “In sandbox, buy a test label for order 1240, then pull its tracking so I can see the whole pipeline before we go live.”

What runs:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping settings set sandbox yes
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels purchase --orders=1240
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping track <shipment-id> --order=1240 --format=json
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels pdf --orders=1240 --output=/tmp/test-label.pdf

labels purchase creates the shipment if needed and logs how many labels it bought; it does not print the tracking number. Get the tracking number from track or shipments get, and export the printable PDF with labels pdf (or labels download for a single label). Sandbox runs against the Chit Chats test environment so you don’t burn credits. Labels are a PRO feature.

You walk away with a confirmed label, retrievable tracking, and a printable PDF, none of it billed against live postage.

Print labels: by hand, with AI, or on a schedule

The label commands behave the same whether a person types them, an agent calls them, or a cron job fires them. Daily fulfillment comes down to one batch:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels purchase --orders=1240,1241,1242
$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping labels pdf --orders=1240,1241,1242 --output=/var/labels/2026-06-11.pdf

labels purchase skips orders that no longer exist and gives a per-order summary. Because labels pdf refuses to overwrite and bails when the target path is already there, stamp each day’s Chit Chats batch with its own date in the --output name and the collisions never happen.

Two automation patterns pay off after you set them up once. First, a deploy gate. Because validate exits non-zero on any FAIL, it stops a deploy whenever the Chit Chats shipping config has broken:

$ wp wc-chitchats-shipping validate --format=json 2>/dev/null \
  | jq -e 'all(.[]; .status != "FAIL")' >/dev/null \
  || { echo "Shipping config has failures"; wp wc-chitchats-shipping validate; exit 1; }

A WARN (say, a thin-on-weight catalog) lets the build through; only a FAIL stops it. Second, a nightly label run: collect the day’s processing order IDs, buy their labels in one batch, and merge them into a dated PDF for the morning print station. For hands-off tracking and order sync, the PRO plugin also has built-in automation cron settings (see the wp-config automation reference).

Works the same across every carrier

The Chit Chats plugin is one of eight that share a single engine, settings model, and command set. What changes between them is the namespace and a few setting keys. Confirm the namespace with wp help | grep shipping, then discover keys with settings list.

Credential keys differ by carrier, which is why you discover them with settings list rather than copying another carrier’s. Chit Chats uses clientId and accessToken; Shippo uses API tokens; FedEx uses a client ID, secret, and account number. Carrier pricing is never hard-coded anywhere in these plugins, so a live rates quote is always the source of truth. For real numbers, check the carrier’s own pricing pages.

Weighing carriers as a Canadian seller? Stallion Express is the other option in this lineup, and we make that plugin too. Chit Chats fits casual and small-volume sellers who drop parcels at a branch and ride the US-injection savings on light cross-border parcels. Stallion covers slightly different geography and weight bands. For a side-by-side, see Chit Chats vs Stallion Express for WooCommerce, and for the Stallion how-to start with how to set up Stallion Express shipping on WooCommerce.

Security

None of this is complicated. A few habits keep a live credential from slipping out.

• Begin in sandbox. Move to live credentials only once a sandbox quote has come back clean, and write the live credential in before you flip sandbox no. Flip it the other way around and there’s no active token, so rates fail.
• Give an agent the sandbox credential while you set things up, then swap in the live one yourself afterward. The real key never has to pass through the agent.
• Keep credentials in wp-config.php constants rather than the database. A constant takes priority over the stored value, never gets written back to the DB, and can keep the credential fields out of the admin UI altogether. That’s how agencies lock down managed-hosting fleets.
• Secrets are redacted in output by default. settings list shows them as [REDACTED], and settings get keeps them masked until you add --raw.

That’s the whole Chit Chats setup, from credentials to a live US-Bound rate at checkout. For why running cross-border setup this way makes sense, and the same command catalog applied to the other seven carriers, see Configuring WooCommerce Shipping with AI Agents and WP-CLI.

Get started

The free plugin gets you live Chit Chats rates at checkout today; the PRO version adds the box-packing engine, bulk labels, auto-tracking, and the fulfillment commands. The plugin already runs on 200+ active installs on WordPress.org and holds 4.83/5 across 12 verified reviews on 1teamsoftware.com, so this is a worn path. Install the free skill, point your assistant at a staging store, and run a validate plus a rates quote to a US address to see the whole loop work.

$ npx skills add https://github.com/1TeamSoftware/skills --skill 1teamsoftware-wc-shipping

• Get ChitChats Shipping: ChitChats Shipping PRO for WooCommerce
• Weighing carriers: Chit Chats vs Stallion Express for WooCommerce
• The full setup workflow across all eight carriers: configure WooCommerce shipping with AI and WP-CLI
• Comparing the major rate platforms: ShipStation vs Shippo vs EasyPost

About the author: 1TeamSoftware builds and maintains the eight WooCommerce shipping plugins covered here, including the Chit Chats integration, used by thousands of stores.