Custom Shipping Profile and General Shipping combined when I don't want it to

[PokeShed]

Hoping somebody can help with a solution for this, I have two different shipping profiles the "general" and an item specific one where we add certain items that are smaller. 

Essentially we want to charge £2.99 for shipping on all products except for a few very small products where we can offer shipping for £0.99. This works great until somebody buys an item from each category. 

When this happens the customer gets charged the combined £2.99 + £0.99, whereas we would only want to charge them the general £2.99 option.

Is there an easy way to prioritise the general rate if it's a combined purchase? 

[Sharon-Reeds]

Hey @PokeShed,

This is a very common question, and unfortunately, Shopify's shipping profiles don't offer this type of control. There are a couple of options that are decent workarounds, but only using a third-party app (Intuitive Shipping can do this) will get you the exact result you're looking for.

If you aren't open to using a third-party app, you can:

• Charge a single flat rate across the board for all of your products (keep in mind that your customers don't know how much it costs to ship, so they don't know the true cost of this) and make this your £2.99 shipping charge. While you are technically overcharging for the light items, £2.99 is still a low shipping cost. This wouldn't be a good strategy if some of these items are less than £5 since the shipping cost is too close to the product cost for customers to be comfy with the shipping charge.
  
  Or

• Add £0.99 to the price of the small items and have "free" shipping on these items. In a cart where 'general' and 'light' items are added, only the 'general' shipping cost will apply.

I know neither of these options give you exactly what you're looking for, but it gets you close.

I hope this helps!

Warm regards,
Sharon 

[PokeShed]

Thanks for your reply! I've actually managed to find a workaround for the time-being which will work for me. 

Your solution would work for a lot of products, but I sell single trading cards which are literally an envelope and charging £2.99 can sometimes triple the cost of the transaction. 

My (somewhat unorthodox) method, using the standard Shopify weight options, is this: 

Set up a shipping rate at £2.99 for anything over 0.1kg, and a £0.99 shipping rate for anything under 0.1kg. 

I've then gone through and made all my products weigh either 0.1kg for larger products or 0.001kg for the single trading cards - which isn't accurate but as I use these two fixed costs doesn't affect me. 

This means that a customer can add up to 99 (which would be unusually high) of the single cards and still get the £0.99 shipping, as soon as they add one larger 0.1kg product (or a mixture), the total weight triggers the £0.99 shipping rate to disappear from checkout and instead only present the customer with the £2.99 rate! 

It's a super weird way to go around it, and will be a headache if I ever actually want to adjust for real product weights in the future, but for now it's doing what I need it to.