How can I apply free shipping to specific products only?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

A merchant wants to apply free shipping selectively—specifically excluding dropshipped items that incur shipping fees—while maintaining a $55 free shipping threshold for other products.

Key Challenge:
Shopify doesn’t natively support free shipping rules limited to specific products or collections when using order-value thresholds. Mixing eligible and non-eligible items in one cart creates customer confusion.

Suggested Workarounds:

  • Discount codes: Can target specific collections for free shipping, but prevent combining with other discount types
  • Third-party apps: Bespoke Shipping, Better Shipping, Parcelify, and Advanced Shipping Manager enable per-product shipping rules (require Carrier Calculated Shipping, adding $20/month or upgrading to Advanced plan at $299/month)
  • Weight-based manipulation: Assign artificial weights to control which products qualify for free shipping
  • Shipping Profiles: Introduced after the original post, allow different shipping rules per product group—but don’t solve time-limited promotional free shipping for specific items

Ongoing Limitation:
Multiple users report wanting discount codes that offer free shipping on specific products/collections for limited-time promotions. This remains unavailable in Shopify’s native discount system, with requests spanning several years.

Summarized with AI on October 25. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
2

Hey Leslie,

Aria here, I’m on the Social Care team at Shopify.

I would strongly advise against this. I think it will be super confusing for your customers if certain items in your store have free shipping when they spend $55 and others do not. What if they want to mix items from the free shipping range and the non-free shipping category? Their $55 spend could be a mixture of the two and it will frustrate them when they realize they can’t mix them. My advice would be to include the shipping in the item price (for your dropshipping items). I realize you said this is not what you want to do.

If you’re sure you want to have free shipping on some items and not others, there are a few workarounds. You can use a discount code. This allows you to offer free shipping on certain collections and not others. You can’t combine discount codes though so this would mean you can’t have a percentage off or a dollar amount off in the same sale.

You can also consider using an app such as Bespoke Shipping or Better Shipping. They both allow you to do per item shipping prices. This would be the best option to achieve what you’re looking for but it’s not the most cost-effective option. Both of these apps would require Carrier Calculated shipping to work. There are 3 ways to add Carrier Calculated Shipping. You can either upgrade to the Advanced Shopify plan which is $299 per month, add it to your existing plan for an additional $20 per month or you can pay annually rather than monthly. This will give you 10% discount on your plan and you’ll get FREE Carrier Calculated Shipping.

The third option would be to do weight-based shipping prices. You don’t have to use the real weight of the item, you can use fake weights to manipulate the prices you want to charge. Instead of doing free shipping over $55, you could do free shipping over a certain weight and make sure your items that are not eligible for free shipping do not have weights so they will always be charged for shipping. In this case, the customer would still end up with free shipping if enough of the other products got added to cart.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have more questions.

Aria
Social Care Guru
Shopify

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