In our POS we have a mix of products, some that are classed as physical items (things customers can take-home or get shipped) and some that are classed as digital items (services provided to customers in-store that they can’t take-home or get shipped). Because we have a mix of products, checkout carts will include this mix. People usually come in-store, are provided several services in-store, and then want the physical items they are purchasing to be shipped to their address instead of carrying-out.
The issue I’ve run into is, when trying to ship physical items from a cart that also includes services/digital items, it won’t allow me to ship.
I use a ‘Ship all Items’ to apply shipping to the cart. In past, it has correctly only shipped physical items and not tried to ship services/digital items.
Two weeks ago an error started appearing at the ‘Select Shipping Method’ stage of processing a shipping order on POS. The error is ‘Couldn’t apply shipping method’.
**Workaround 1: Set delivery methods per item** Instead of tapping the general “Ship All” button for the whole cart, you can set the delivery method individually for each line item. Leave the digital/service items as “carry-out” or “in-store,” and only apply the shipping method to the physical bottles.
**Workaround 2: Update the product settings** If you head into your Shopify Admin and open the product page for the specific service item, you can make sure the **“This is a physical product”** option is completely toggled **OFF**. As long as that is turned off and inventory tracking is disabled for those service items, the system should stop trying to calculate shipping for them during checkout.
Both of these workarounds provided have not worked.
I’ve tried mixing the cart with different products and tried shipping to different addresses, all met with the same error. For some years now we’ve been able to process shipping sales from POS with both physical and service items in cart with no problems, this is a new and recent error.
You have already tried both obvious fixes, so rather than a third workaround, here is how to find out which half is broken. It started two weeks ago on a setup that worked, so something changed on one side.
Ring up a cart with one physical item and nothing else, same customer address.
If that also fails, the mix is not your problem at all. It is rates: the retail location you sell from is not in a shipping profile that covers that address, or its rates were removed. Couldn’t apply shipping method is exactly what a location with no rate returns.
If it succeeds, the mix is the trigger, and then it is worth checking the service items at variant level rather than product level.
This is a physical product is stored per variant, not per product. Toggling it off on the product page does not always rewrite variants that already existed, and POS reads the variant. Open one service item, go into the variant itself, and check whether it still requires shipping there. A variant that says yes while the product page says no would produce exactly this: the cart keeps asking for a rate for something that cannot have one.
One more thing worth knowing either way: build the same mixed cart as a draft order in Admin and try to apply shipping there. If Admin gives you a rate and POS does not, the problem is POS side and support has somewhere concrete to look. If Admin fails too, it is the shipping profile, and you have just cut the search in half.
Hey! Since this started suddenly around 2 weeks ago, worth checking what changed around then rather than the product setup itself :
Shipping zones/rates : Check Settings > Shipping and delivery - a rate or zone condition may have changed and stopped matching your customer’s address.
Apps : Any shipping/POS-related app that auto-updated recently could be the trigger.
POS app version : Make sure it’s on the latest update.
If all that checks out and the Draft Order test still fails, it’s likely a bug worth escalating to Shopify Support directly. Hope this helps
You did the bisect properly, and it rules out the product setup entirely. The admin test is what settles it.
I’d put money on shipping profiles. Settings, Shipping and delivery: count how many profiles you have before looking at any rate inside them.
If the services sit in a different profile from the physical items, or in General while the physical ones are in a custom profile, Shopify splits the order into two shipping groups and wants a rate for each one. One group has none, so the whole checkout returns that error, which is why it follows you into the admin and across every address.
Fix is either moving the services into the same profile as the physical products, or leaving them where they are and giving that profile a 0 rate covering everywhere you sell.
If your profile list shows only one profile, say so, because then it’s something else and I’d want to see the service product’s own page.
