Really confused about shipping

Hi everyone,



Maybe I’m just being dense about this, but I’m really confused about how the shipping works.



I had created my locations so that I could tax properly based on location. And then I had created a custom shipping type that says something like “Free 5-7 Day Shipping”.



But, my problem is that in the cart when you try to get rates or checkout, it says “Sorry, no shipping options are available for your location” no matter what I did. I can see where it says to set it manually based on location, but I’m not seeing how I just set those static values.



If I change the items themselves to “Free shipping” set to yes, then it works fine. But that’ll mess up when we have any international sales. Am I assuming correctly that the Free Shipping will trump any shipping that I create for out of country?



Basically what we’re looking to do is free shipping in the US, and outside the US you pay the extra shipping and handling.



I considered just doing it with a Tax but naming the tax “International shipping” and adding my static value to it. Would that work?



Is there some way I can create just two static values for shipping (inside and outside the US)??