Exclude specific items from Free Shipping Calculation

Exclude specific items from Free Shipping Calculation

Andrew_Funk1
Tourist
6 0 4

I sell both physical and digital products, such as access to online video tutorials.  Orders above a specific dollar amount qualify for shipping.  I would like to set up my shipping profile so that digital products are excluded from the threshold calculation for free shipping. 

 

As an example, a customer could purchase a $27 video course and add a $9 pen set and qualify for free shipping at $35.  The shipment of the pen set is a money loser in this situation once fulfillment and shipping costs are taken into account on top of the cost of the materials.  The sale of the pen set is meant to be an upsell, but in this situation, it is an anchor on profit.

 

Is there any way for me to separate a specific set of products (in this case my digital products) from the free shipment calculation?  I have reviewed other threads and some have mentioned the possibility of creating custom shipping rates for specific products but I would like to understand the solution better before implementing something on my live store.

 

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Replies 6 (6)

Kimi
Shopify Staff
1511 169 269

Hi @Andrew_Funk1.

 

To confirm, non-physical or digital products will still contribute to shipping rates that are price-based. The only exception to this rule is digital gift cards, which doesn't count towards a price-based shipping rate.

 

This is expected behaviour for price-based flat rates, however the workaround to exclude a digital product from your store's free shipping threshold would be to set up weight-based conditions instead. This would exclude digital products from being calculated against the free shipping total, since digital products don't have any weight attributed to them. So as an example, rather than setting up free shipping on your store for orders above $35, you can change this so that orders that are above 5kg will qualify for free shipping instead, for example. 

 

The other alternative for this is to look at installing a third-party shipping app to help resolve this issue. There are a few shipping apps on the Shopify App store that you can take a look at, however I'll list some of the most commonly used ones below:

 

 

Just a note however that these apps are made by third-party developers outside of Shopify. So if you have any questions about them, and to see if they will suit your specific needs, you can contact their support team directly as they're best equipped to answer app-specific queries.

 

Please also keep in mind that your store will need the carrier calculated shipping rate (CCS) feature enabled in order to use these shipping apps. So if you haven't already added this onto your store, you can reach out to our live support team so that we can get this feature added onto your store.

Kimi | Social Care @ Shopify 
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Andrew_Funk1
Tourist
6 0 4

Thank you for the thorough response.  I do wish this were an integrated solution in Shopify but I at least now have a roadmap of potential solutions with third-party products.  I'll review these, thank you!

Kimi
Shopify Staff
1511 169 269

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, @Andrew_Funk1.

 

I definitely see how useful it is to have this integration as a native feature within the Shopify admin, so I'll pass this along as feedback to our developers. We can only improve our platform with feedback shared by our merchants like yourself, so I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us here.

 

Just a note that while we can't guarantee when or if changes will be made to our platform, you can check our changelog here for the latest updates.

Kimi | Social Care @ Shopify 
 - Was my reply helpful? Click Like to let me know! 
 - Was your question answered? Mark it as an Accepted Solution
 - To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Shopify Blog

Andrew_Funk1
Tourist
6 0 4

This issue persists to this day, wish there was a fix.

technase
Shopify Partner
209 1 47

was looking for the same thing and there is actually a work-around. All you need to do is to create a custom shipping profile for the item you want exempt from free shipping. Settings > Shipping and Delivery > Create new profile > Add only that specific product to the profile and its rate.. 

technase
Andrew_Funk1
Tourist
6 0 4

You can't add digital products to a shipping profile.  If you don't check the box that an item requires shipment it can't be on a profile.