We don’t want to collect duties ahead of time, but would like to ship internationally. Some of our products contain both online and physical components. Can we set up the product so that the duty is only collected upon on the value of the physical shipped products, not the entire value of the product?
The good news is that Shopify’s built in duty calculation already only applies duties to physical products. Anything marked as “not physical” will not have duties calculated:
However, it sounds like you want to sell something that is a mix of both. Maybe 30% of the value of the item is based on online features, and 70% of the value is based on the physical goods that will be shipped. Unfortunately, we need to either add the item to customs documentation (and pay duties on it), or omit it (because it is digital and will not physically pass through customs). We can’t normally report only a percent of a product on a customs document.
One possible workaround is to use something that appears to be one item on the storefront, that expands to 2 items in the cart. Then the buyer chooses one item, but you are free to break down the pricing between the physical and non-physical pieces the way that you want. When it comes time to calculate duties, and create customs docs, Shopify will only calculate based on the value of the physical products, the way that you want.
Shopify has a first-party Bundles app that should be able to solve this for you. But if not, there are lots of apps on the app store that work very similarly.