How can I offer free shipping for digital products and mixed orders?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

A merchant seeks to implement free shipping for two specific scenarios that standard Shopify shipping rules don’t handle:

Problem A: Digital + Physical Product Orders

  • Customer buys $50 eGift card + $50 physical product (total $100)
  • Should qualify for free shipping threshold ($75+), but doesn’t because gift card is digital
  • Merchant wants to avoid charging shipping in these mixed orders

Problem B: Subscription Mixed Orders

  • Subscribe & save orders already receive free shipping
  • When customers combine subscription items with one-time purchases in same order, shipping charges apply to non-subscription items
  • Merchant wants free shipping to apply to entire order when subscriptions are present

Solution Found (Problem A only):
A participant shared a workaround using checkout blocks:

  • Maintains standard shipping rules (free over $50)
  • Adds custom shipping discount that triggers when cart contains both: (1) items totaling $50+ and (2) products from a “Gift Cards” collection
  • This approach preserves Shopify’s native gift card functionality (automated emails, balance tracking)

Status: Problem B (subscription mixed orders) remains unresolved in the thread.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I want to try and solve for the following two scenarios:

Macro level I have a rule to allow free shipping over $75. Seems easy enough in theory. But here is where I have trouble executing on that:

a. eGift cards

A customer buys a $50 gift card and a $50 product. Total order is $100. Should be free. However, because the gift card is digital, customer is still getting charged. I don’t want that.

b. Subscriptions (through Recharge). We offer free shipping on all subscribe and save orders. Sometimes however, customers mix and match and order a subscribe and save order and a non sub and save order. Since they already qualified for the free shipping with subscribe and save, we don’t want to charge them for shipping on the other item, even if the sum is less than $75.

How could I solve for this?

2

Did you ever find a solution for the eGift cards being purchased with physical products to get free shipping?

3

Wanted to share my solution to option A in case anyone comes across this thread.

I did not want to create a physical product for my gift card and then have to do all the work of emailing out the gift cards since Shopify already does all of the nicely and tracks the gift cards and balances.

I left the regular shipping rules in place in the shipping policy/settings for free shipping on orders over $50.
Then I added a custom shipping discount using checkout blocks that checks if the cart subtotal is $50 or more, and if one of the items in the cart is in the collection Gift Cards (which I added my gift card product to), then shipping is free. Seems to be working!