How to edit product weight on Shopify without increasing shipping cost?

[thelacecactus]

We at The Lace Cactus are also having problems editing our products and adding new. Can @Shopify please get this fixed. We do not add the weight to each of our products. It increases shipping cost to our customers, and we ship with a flat rate price. 

[Shay]

Hi there! Thank you for reaching out about this issue.

Would you mind sharing some additional details about the problem you are experiencing? I'm not able to review store admins through our community forums to review the issue with you live. If you need live assistance or need to report a technical issues please follow this link: Contact Shopify Support.  

[RedCatRecords]

We have tens of thousands of items in our inventory. Does @Shopify mean that we should pay staff to manually input a value that we don't even use for each of these items? That's going to take days and it does us no good whatsoever.

[BandB]

Yes, the requirement for a +ve weight above the default 0.0 is a serious inconvenience it would be best for Shopify to fix quickly. Like many Shopify users, we don't do weight based shipping calculations or services. Also in our case (jewellery) the product weight and final shipping weight with box/wrap/envelope are not related. So we are left with the significant task of manually weighing entering actual or meaningless numbers for thousands of products and/or doing a bulk CSV re-import to overwrite the existing zero value. 

I have had problems arising from past bulk product imports. I don't want to do this and I'm sure there must be thousands of Shopify users in the same boat. Nor am I going to manually weigh thousands of tiny lightweight products for no useful reason.

Simplest would be for the developers to re-enable 0.0 as an allowable value in product weight. Or if there is a technical reason why a value is required, reset the default system value to the lowest fractional weight allowable and automatically repopulate that field where it currently shows 0.0

[NoName30]

What is actually the link to get support?  Because if I use the link you have, it only takes me to all the information about Shopify.  Nothing to actually get live help or even email help.

[lostpages]

Shopify support confirmed the tech team forced a change - weight is now required on all physical products. no notification given to customers or customer service. only suggested fix is for us to create a csv file to add the weight to products. very, very frustrating

[Kitler]

Say it isn't so!! 😮
This is not useful, Shopify.

[Shay]

Hi everyone! Thank you for your feedback and responses here. I understand that this change may have come as a surprise and that is feedback I am sharing with our team who handles these platform updates. 

Moving forward all physical products that are marked as "requires shipping" in their product profile will require a weight greater than 0.0. Exporting to CSV, updating the product weight and reimporting is the fastest option to updating these products. You can read more about this in our Help Center here: Using CSV files to import and export products · Shopify Help Center.

Please know that I am sharing your feedback on this change with our developers in real time. So please don't hesitate to reply back to this thread with how this change could impact your workflow or business needs. You can also reach out to our live support to provide that feedback through there as well. 

[lostpages]

Hi Shay,

Please do share this information - I don't want anything to come across as "bashing" shopify, on the contrary, I think most of us have or have had good experiences with the platform. But when changes like this are made, coupled with news of Shopify's employment layoffs hitting the news on the previous day, well, you may understand why some of us start wondering if these type of unannounced, impactful changes will become the new norm. The fact that this will only benefit Shopify's behind the scenes data-collection and not the user is additonally problematic. And finally, the csv file (of which Shopify recommends for every fix) only works for the simplest of cookie-cutter stores that do not use heavy customization. All others require manual input/corrections after loading the file. If the change could be reversed, that would be ideal to your customers. If you are not able to satisfy your customers with this issue, then COMMUNICATION of ALL changes must be made for the future and for future customer retention. This change, from the outside, appears geared toward making Shopify an "Amazon Lite", with Shopify's focus seemingly centered around the Shop app. Very concerning, as again, this change brings no meaningful benefit to your customers, only to Shopify, and it seems that Shopify have left all communication and cleanup regarding the issue up to Customer Service Reps such as yourself (You've been wonderful!) - Today may be a good day to let your tech team answer the phones and emails, which would allow them to understand the impact of a poorly-researched and mishandled update.

[sflann]

Hi Shay,

Thanks for your response. Maybe I'm missing something, but it really seems like there should be a way to mark an item as both physical and does not require shipping. Right now it seems like it is assuming all physical products require shipping. 

Based on the help doc you linked, the "Variant Requires Shipping" column in the csv file controls both whether the product is considered physical and needs shipping. A TRUE value marks the products as both physical and requires shipping. FALSE does the inverse. On the product page, you can only mark "This is a physical product" under shipping, which I assume ties to the "Variant Requires Shipping" csv column.

So either it is physical and requires shipping (and therefore weight value as well) or is a non-physical item and does not require shipping/weight value? This logic seems shortsighted, particularly for POS-only products that are physical and are not available for shipping.

[Kitler]

I noticed today while editing products and adding some new, this seems to not be a issue any more. I hope someone saw the error in this and that this experiment is over, b/c it was BAD IDEA. 😂

[lostpages]

Agreed - The weight is no long a requirement.  Kudos to Shay @ Shopify, we appreciate you sharing our feedback, and a thank you to the development/tech team for recognizing an error and correcting it. Mistakes happen, it's how we deal with them that matters. Quick fix by Shopify and very much appreciated!

[lostpages]

Agreed - The weight is no long a requirement. Kudos to Shay @ Shopify, we appreciate you sharing our feedback, and a thank you to the development/tech team for recognizing an error and correcting it. Mistakes happen, it's how we deal with them that matters. Quick fix by Shopify and very much appreciated!

[BandB]

Indeed. Good for Shay@Shopify if we've got this back to the original. Easy to make a mistake to think that because a 'field' is there, everyone uses it and will feel the need to complete it accurately. We're all far too lazy for that....... 😉

[Shay · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone! I just wanted to confirm what many of you have found out already. Over the course of the weekend the decision to make the weight field mandatory on physical products was reversed. All product creation should be back to the way it was before the change was put in place! 

I appreciate the thanks as well, but the thank you should go to every merchant who reached out and shared feedback. The feedback noted here in the community forums was definitely a big piece of that decision. So thank all of you for voicing your concerns and helping us help you. 😄

[holbertllc]

Is there a way or can a way be added to see all physical products that do not have a shipping weight listed? I have close to 1,000 of items that all need shipping weights. be cause of this change Things get entered without a shipping weight and it cause issue when orders come in.

[Kitler]

We are having the exact same issue. I do not need to enter the weight of every. single. thing.  C'mon, Shopify, don't do this.

[annafaie]

This is so irritating! I don't even ship my items.

[paigehb]

We had the very same issue today. We also do not enter weight for our products as we ship according to product price and anything over $100 ships free. Every time I had to make a change to a product today or tried to create a new product, I couldn't save until I entered a value other than 0 in the weight field. So frustrating not to get any advance notice.

[Adam_Sewell]

Had the same issue, we have thousands of items. Our major issue was some of ours DO have weights (we use this to filter bulk freight items)

My solution was:

Export all as CSV file

Highlight the "Variant Grams" column & use 'Find & Replace'

Use the values - "Find what: 0" and "Replace with: 0.1"

Make sure the "Match Case" & "Match Entire Cell Contents" options are ticked

Import the products back in 👌

Worked for me and quick too.

[lostpages]

This is a work-around, but unfortunately csv files don't load stylized product pages correctly. I don't think a solution is as much of an issue for most of us (it's obvious  a default value needs to be added), but the fact that a major change was pushed through without notification. Businesses follow processes. Processes are written into manuals. Employees follow manuals. Manuals are created from the information provided. It was Shopify's responsibility to notify users of the change, and they failed, hence last-minute breakdowns of processes that truly shouldn't be an issue. While it may have seemed like common-sense to a programmer, thorough review would have revealed that this would obviously have a negative affect on the user. Additionally, the fact that this change does not benefit the user and on the surface appears to only benefit behind-the-scenes product data-mining, makes the entire update suspect for the end user/customer. We haven't experienced this type of issue with Shopify previously, as prior to this update most, if not all, communication has been open and straightforward. Here's to hoping a mistake is recognized, corrected, and avoided in the future 🤞

[donnamac]

@lostpages 

Hello LostPages

Could you please tell me more about the ' csv files don't load stylized product pages correctly'??

What do you mean by 'stylized'? 

Just wondering what you did to your product to consider them stylized because I will need to export product and take out the weight they put in (cleaning up their mess....again) and I am wondering if we did anything to the product entry that might cause us some problems.

Any information would be appreciated. 

Thank you in advance.

[NoName30]

We are experiencing the same problem.  It is insisting on making us put in a weight when adding a item or editing/making it unavailable.  It is extra time that isn't needed.  We do not ever add weights as we don't ship through Shopify or it's shipping partners either.  It actually costs us less to have our own commercial postal account than to use the Shopify shipping. And as for contacting Shopify to fix the problem, the link recommended only puts you on a carousel.  There is no email link to directly contact them!  So frustrating and not necessary.