Shopify shipping rates: how to set them up

Every store has a General profile that covers all products and all locations by default. If everything you sell ships the same way, you can work entirely inside that profile and never create another.

Custom profiles are for products that should be priced differently. You might create one for bulky items, one for products shipped from a second warehouse, or one for items that always ship free. To make one, go to Shipping and delivery, choose Create new profile, give it a name, pick the products and the locations they ship from, and then add zones and rates inside it.

A product can only belong to one custom profile at a time. Anything not assigned to a custom profile falls back to the General profile, so you never have a product with no shipping rules at all.

Click Add rate inside a zone and choose Set up your own rates. Give the rate a name the customer will read, such as Standard delivery, and enter a price. That is a flat rate.

To vary the price, click Add conditions. You can base the rate on order weight or order price. For example, you might charge one price for orders from 0 to 1 kg, a higher price from 1 to 5 kg, and another above that. Or you might charge less for orders over a certain value. Each condition becomes its own rate, so name each one clearly.

Weight-based rates only work if your products have weights. Open each product and fill in the weight in the Shipping section. A product with no weight is treated as having none, which gives you a rate that is too low.

Carrier-calculated shipping asks a carrier, or an app that talks to one, for the price of each order while the customer is at checkout. It gives accurate rates, but it comes with limits that surprise people.

• Availability depends on your Shopify plan, and on whether an app supplies the rates. Check Shopify's current help pages for what your plan allows, because those terms change.
• Accurate results need accurate product weights and, for many carriers, dimensions. Bad data gives bad quotes.
• Set up your packages under Shipping and delivery > Packages so Shopify knows the box sizes and weights it should use.
• If the carrier service is slow or unavailable, the checkout may show a fallback rate or none. Add a fallback rate in the app or the zone so customers can still buy.
• South African merchants often use a shipping platform such as Bob Go, which compares couriers like The Courier Guy and Aramex, or a pickup network such as Pargo, PUDO or PAXI. Whichever you use, test the rates it returns before you rely on them.

• Leaving product weights blank, so weight-based or carrier-calculated rates come out too low.
• Putting a country in the wrong zone, or leaving a country out, so customers there cannot check out.
• Setting a free shipping threshold without checking it against margin.
• Naming rates vaguely. Standard and Express mean nothing without a delivery time, so describe what the customer gets, but only promise times your courier supports.
• Forgetting that products in a custom profile ignore the General profile. Changing General rates will not change those products.
• Not placing a test order. Add a product to the cart as a customer would, enter addresses from each zone, and read the rates at checkout.
• Charging more for shipping than it costs without saying why, which pushes customers into abandoning the cart.