E-Commerce provides you with the ability to automatically charge shipping fees during the checkout. Essentially you assign weights to your products, and then the shipping fee is calculated locally through charges you assign, or remotely via live shipping APIs (currently UPS, USPS and Canada Post are supported).

Note: For simple shipping, without the need to a shipping API like USP, please refer to Flexicharge.

After you've installed the core modules, the relevant modules you can activate for shipping in administer » modules are:

Module Description
shipping This provides the core shipping functionality (API).
shipcalc Provides hooks for "partner" files which each interface with an external shipping API. It is observed that most of shipcalc's features can be incorporated into the shipping module and the two will be merged eventually.
address Manages the user shipping and billing addresses.

Shipbasic.module

See also the shipbasic.module ( http://drupal.org/node/68363 ) under development as an alternative to the shipcalc.module.