Set your delivery prices once and reuse them on every listing.
A shipping profile is where you post from and what you charge to send a parcel to each destination. Every item points at one, and you cannot list anything until you have made your first.
Most shops need one. A second is worth having when something genuinely ships differently — a heavy piece, a fragile one, work you send from another address.
Add Profile asks for three things: a Name, the From Country you post from, and your From Zipcode.
The name is the only thing you will see when choosing a profile on an item — not the country, not the rates. So call it something you can tell apart later: Small parcels from Belgium rather than Profile 2.
The truck icon on a profile opens Shipping Costs, where each row is one destination. Add Cost starts a new one, and each row asks for:
Business Days is the one that counts. It sets the delivery date the buyer is shown and the date your delivery is measured against. Fill both in, but get that one right.
Add one row per destination, and only one. Two rows for the same country — a Standard and an Express, say — leave it undecided which applies.
You do not need a row for all two hundred countries. In the To country list there is an entry called Everywhere else, sitting alphabetically among the E's, and it is the catch-all: it applies to any destination you have not given a rate of its own.
Add it first, before anything else. If a buyer's country has no rate and you have no Everywhere else row, Artmire charges them nothing for shipping — and the parcel still costs you what it costs. Nothing warns you when this happens.
So the usual shape is a handful of specific rows for where you post most often, and one Everywhere else row set high enough that an unexpected destination does not lose you money.
At checkout Artmire looks for a rate matching the buyer's delivery address. Failing that it uses your Everywhere else row. Failing that, nothing.
Rates are read at the moment of payment, so changing one takes effect immediately for anything not yet paid for — including items already sitting in someone's cart. Orders already paid keep the rate they were charged.
A profile can only be deleted once nothing depends on it. Artmire refuses while any item still points at it, or while any order was charged at its rates — paid or not.
That second one is permanent. An order is the record of what a buyer agreed to pay, and deleting the rate behind it would erase that, so a profile a sale has gone through stays for good. It costs nothing to leave in place.
To retire a profile you no longer use: open each item still on it, choose another profile, then delete it. If the delete is refused, the dialog says which of the two reasons applies.
When a delete does go through, every rate inside the profile goes with it. That is the whole of what is lost — the listings and orders that would have been affected are exactly the ones that stopped the delete.
The shipping cost appears in their total at checkout, before they pay, and on the order afterwards. It is not hidden and not added at the end.
What they cannot see is the rate itself while browsing — there is no shipping table on your shop page, and no per-country list on an item. Your Shipping policy is where you explain in words how you send things and roughly how long it takes.