Shipping profiles are a disaster for us

[mnearents]

The way shipping profiles are designed have created so many problems for our store. We sell normal products and then we sell products that qualify for media-mail rates. So we have two shipping profiles, each with their own rates.

Now, from a customer perspective, we have priced our products such that any order, regardless of what's in it, qualifies for free shipping if over a $15 threshold.

That seems pretty simple to comprehend, but it's almost impossible to actually implement with the way shipping profiles are set up. Because products can only belong to one profile, and each profile is separate, Shopify has weird rules about orders that contain items from both.

So for example, an order containing <$15 of products from profile 1, and <$15 of products from profile 2, doesn't allow the user to select Free shipping. It's because when products are ordered across profiles, Shopify checks for the cheapest rate between the two profiles. But it doesn't consider "Free" as the cheapest. What???

The only solution would be to get rid of the second profile (what's the point in having multiple profiles then?) and start shipping orders non-media mail rates, which for 2+ lbs of planners/journals, would be triple the price for us and we'd no longer be able to ship for free.

Why can't there be some sort of relationship between the two profiles, why do they have to be totally mutually exclusive? Why can't we set up rules for orders that contain products from multiple profiles? Like overrides? Why can't products belong to multiple profiles? If I could have media-mail products in my media mail profile, but also include them in my general profile, then mixed orders would just use the general profile rates, which would fix all of this.

[mnearents]

@Elias I'm wondering if you've heard similar feedback for shipping profiles or if you can ask someone on the shipping profiles team about this. I've been trying different things for weeks and the best I've come up with is a free shipping coupon, which also has problems because either customers can use it to get free upgraded shipping (don't want that), or if I set a shipping price limit, the coupon won't work for economy shipping on large orders.