Multiāorigin shipping charges combine per location, causing customers to see multiple shipping fees when items are sourced from different locations. Merchants want to charge a single shipping rate while keeping accurate multiālocation inventory, citing lost sales and cart abandonment.
Shopifyās stance: this is expected behavior for multiālocation fulfillment; no native toggle to combine rates and no timeline for change. A June API update reportedly broke prior app workarounds for many stores.
Workarounds and outcomes:
Configure a single āShipping Fromā location and remove rates from others: prevents double charges but depletes inventory from the main location, requiring manual reassignment; conflicts with local pickup/delivery.
Disable multiāorigin shipping or set one fulfillment location with āContinue selling when out of stockā: avoids double charge but risks overselling and inventory inaccuracies.
Shopify Scripts (Plus): a shared script detects doubled flat rates (e.g., .99 ā .98) and autoādiscounts shipping by 50% to restore the intended rate; best for flatārate setups.
Apps: Shipeasy previously worked; postāJune, new stores are told the feature is disabled (some grandfathered stores still functional). Calcurates says it canāt solve this. Decimalāio offers a custom solution (primary warehouse must be US). ShipMagic claims a flatārate fix, including on Basic.
Status: Unresolved natively; partial solutions exist with tradeāoffs. Discussion remains active; merchants keep requesting a oneārate option.
HI ! Hoping eventually to find a solution but here is our issue.
We currently have 1 main store that houses our main inventory and 1 of our 2 retail stores, we also have another location across town that houses a smaller amount of our inventory as well as our second retail store. We currently only ship out of our 1 main location because we were having terrible shipping issues but ideally would like to turn shipping back on there to capitalize on their inventory.
We originally had multi origin shipping turned on so that we could use both inventories to fulfill our online orders, however we drive to our other locations to physically pick up the merchandise and ship form 1 location so that we donāt have to buy 2 shipping labels and charge our customers twice. In an ideal world we would keep doing this except half the time our customers end up abandoning their carts because shipping at times was over $20.
Is there a way to turn multi origin shipping back on but still only charge 1 shipping rate?
We have though about sending an email to our customers letting them know if they receive a double charge for shipping that we will refund a portion of their shipping, however this was not ideal for a lot of our customers who were already tight on cash who may not have had the extra shipping money to place an order to begin with.
Another issue with having the 1 location turned off is when someone buys something from our online store and we donāt have it at our main store, it pulls out of our secondary location (which is fine) except it messes our inventory numbers up. It subtracts -1 from our secondary store and then adds it into our stock at our main location, but the problem is that its adding it to our inventory to sell not as sold item so then it looks like we have 1 more than we actually do which creates a nightmare when you have 1,000 order coming in a day and have to manually adjust the inventory for each item ordered.
Shopify please help us! There are so many of us who are struggling with this and it needs to be fixed!
Weāre in the same boat. I keep getting hit with app suggestions. Both our Shopify partners/developers and app support teams tell us that Shopify has virtually made it impossible to calculate shipping from a single address despite having multiple locations. Sounds like they are catering to drop shippers than actual businesses.
Wondering if Shopify would like to chime in on this one. Weāre encountering the same issue. We were previously online only (so only one location), but have now opened up a storefront. If a customer tries to order items that happen to have some stock at our storefront, and some that are only at the warehouse, it charges double shipping. We use a simple flat rate, same price, no matter how much you order, but itās hitting people with 2 charges. Should not be a hard fix. Make an option to have flat rate beā¦flat rate. Signing up for the POS system with multiple locations has been kind of a pain.
Iāve reached out to multiple people at Shopify regarding this. Same answer every time. āThis is desired when merchants are shipping items from multiple warehouses and do need to collect shipping costs for multiple areas.ā When you explain that all shipping happens from one location they acknowledge that it could be a nuisance but just say this is how itās done on Shopify. My feeling is that they are catering to drop shippers over small/medium size business with multiple locations. Almost as if we are the ones doing it wrong and that we should be shipping from each location. Our business has 5 locations and a warehouse - so you can imagine some of the shipping charges our potential customers see.
Here were some of their suggestions, all of which led to nowhere.
Use a Third Party App - Received an email from Advanced Shipping Rules app that read, āShopify has made it impossible to achieve this.ā
Use aseparatewarehouse location - Essentially, taking our inventory manually to one location. Impossible with items spread around between 5 locations and offering curbside pickup.
Customization with Scripts - Our Shopify Partnerās tested all of Shopifyās suggestions and Scripts do not work in this scenario.
Switch back to single-origin - This turns off any multi-store fulfillment opportunities like local delivery/pickup
After almost two months of back and forth with Shopify. This is where we ended up. We now have to dig through abandoned carts and each order to adjust shipping charges manually.
Unfortunately there is not an immediate action or solution from the Shopify end to directly solve for this. We have shared all of the workarounds available with you. I understand your frustration and am sorry that thereās no simple solution for this right away. Weāve already submitted your feedback on this to our development team as a frustration point and they will prioritize this request along with many other requests in the best way possible. Our team is well aware of this issue, this is something other merchants have asked about too.
We try to build our platform to meet the needs of most merchants and then we lean on our ecosystem of apps and developers to support additional needs. While we are always releasing new functionality and improvements, I donāt have a specific timeline on when this shipping scenario will be added to our roadmap so I canāt say for sure when to expect an update on it. If youād like to discuss the current available workarounds on a call, just let me know.
We did not realize customers would be double charged when setting this up additional fulfillment locations as well. We are trying to fix as we are also losing customers who do not wish to be double charged. Agree on one hand Shopify should give merchants the option to double charge if shipping from two location if that is their business model. However, when you are selling items from your website if a customer happens to choose an item from one location and another item from another location (unknown to customer) it is not their fault and we should not penalize them and double charge for shipping. I see these threads are from months ago so this is something that should be fixed now by Shopify. There are many companies who have inventory stored in more than one location and we would like to continue to track this way and only charge one fee to customer for shipping. We should have the option to tell our shopping cart we would like the customer to only be charged shipping once for their order based on total price of order or total weight of order, etc based on your criteria. Please let me know if this has been fixed and if not Iām so confused as Shopify has enough techs to fix this pretty quick.
And Iām tired of hearing from @Shopify_77 , āAny feedback you share is reviewed by the Plus Support Leadership team and is used to improve your experience.ā
Itās been over a year now and Iām afraid itās falling on deaf ears.
I was able to fix the double charge to customer but with that causes another issue. If you go to Settings> Shipping and Deliver> Manage Rates> Shipping From: Manage: Designate just one āShipping Locationā so for all other locations you will click āRemove rates for [Shipping Locations]ā. The āShipping Locationā you designate as the main you will need to make sure for all items in inventory that no items can be listed as āNot Stockedā. Any items listed as āNot Stockedā you need to update to a number ā0ā or if you have inventory certainly add that. Now with this change your customers will be charged the correct amount for shipping (not double charged). If you do not change inventory from āNot Stockedā to ā0ā for your main location then anyone who attempts to purchase one of those āNot Stockedā items will not give the customer an option for shipping.
So the issue Iām now having is when an order comes thru for an item from one warehouse and another item from another warehouse it will only deplete inventory from my main location listed in āShipping and Deliveryā. So for example if I have āWarehouse Aā with 0 items in inventory and āWarehouse Bā with 50 items in inventory. If my main warehouse is āWarehouse Aā which has 0 inventory and āWarehouse Bā has 50 inventory and customer orders an items from āWarehouse Bā. The problem is Shopify is depleting from āWarehouse Aā since thatās my main warehouse which means it is now showing -1 and āWarehouse Bā is still at 50. So you can go into each order manually and āChange Locationā to correct location and the system will add back inventory from one location and deplete from correct location. If youāre not receiving that many orders per day this is doable but if you have a busy store doing 100+ orders per day will be too time consuming. Plus if you receive an order with multiple items from different warehouses makes it difficult to assign to correct location.
We currently have three locations setup and we would like to continue to keep our inventory separate and accurate. So should be pretty simple if someone orders an item from one warehouse the system should deplete from that warehouse and if they order an item from multiple warehouses it should deplete from each warehouse they ordered from. This is really not that complicated.
Does anyone have any suggestions on another workaround or any word from Shopify when this will be fixed? Shopify is generating billions in revenue and has hundreds if not thousands of techs. This is something that should be fixed. As Iāve stated in a prior thread this is not the customers fault and they should not be paying double shipping. In reality Shopify is losing more business in revenue with this error multiplied by thousands of other stores. Please fix. @Shopify_77
It seems like you have the best fix so far! I will have to give this a try. We have the same issue where it removes inventory from our main store instead of pulling it from the store its actually stocked at, we then have to manually adjust each inventory for hundreds of orders, which is an inventory nightmare.
@Scott1968 Both of these solutions were suggested from Shopify and I credit both of you for manually putting things in place. With tons of brick and mortar action out of 5 locations, live inventory syncs with our POS, and having over 16K Skus, I would be sitting in an inventory nightmare trying to reconcile every single order where this happens.
Right now we have flows in place where if a shipping charge passes a certain dollar amount we get notified and reach out to the customer to apologize and capture the correct shipping charge. Weāre also lucky that some of our regulars also call in when experiencing the double charge. We had someone across the country that was shipping express and got a $192 quote for 3 itemsā¦
Unfortunately, going through our abandoned carts and identifying orders where a double charge took place shows a massive loss in potential sales. It seems we all have our little solutions in place to band-aid the damage but they are time consuming and ineffective, making it even more frustrating when that Shopify bill comes every month. Perhaps, if we keep this thread hot someone from @Shopify_77 development could help us out here.
@arayard Yes agree this probably has a big loss of revenue for all of us based on abandoned carts. Speaking of Abandoned carts I do not believe this is functioning the same way it was a year ago. In the past when i would start an order but not complete it would generally show up in abandoned cart area. This past week I probably did 50 test orders (between three stores) but did not click submit so see if they would show up in our abandoned cart area and there were zero abandoned carts with my info from the test. We do receive abandoned carts but obviously not all. So this is very concerning as Iām not able to tell how many actual abandoned carts we are receiving as customer see crazy high shipping and they simply exit the cart and not hit submit. Curious if you have any input with abandoned carts if they are all showing for you or are you using an app for abandoned carts? @Shopify_77
Interesting, thatās frustrating. I do see abandoned carts on my end but I havenāt tested out abandoning my own carts to confirm. The issue Iām dealing with at the moment is customer gift notes/order notes not pulling through into the order admin. Perfect timing for the holidays @Shopify_77
@arayard If you figure anything out with abandoned carts let me know but I do not believe there are any other settings which will allow us to see more abandoned carts? Possibly there is an app which I will look but this obviously would make a big difference if the Abandoned cart section was working correctly we could send automated emails based on double shipping charges. This is a pretty big error on @Shopify_77 side as we should be able to see all legit abandoned carts. Considering I did approx 50 test orders and not one came thru the abandoned cart and the majority of the ones I did I took to the very end so all of my info was in the system including card, etc and I simply did not hit submit.
I also spoke with a developer who said he has a fix in Shopify Plus for double charge shipping/inventory system. We have a few stores but only using āShopify Advancedā. If you are using Shopify Plus let me know and I can forward his info to you.
They figured it out. Iāve been running with them since 12/2021 and for the most part they have this issue nailed down.
Iām now running a āWeight Basedā scenario with the following conditions.
Cart quantity is greater than or equals 1 items.
Then I added a shipping method for that scenario with shipping calculated based on cart weight with range values corresponding to their shipping costs. The rates are not combining for multilocation orders. Based on my use case, I recommend doing some math to get to a safe spot so you donāt lose out on shipping and building out pricing for weight ranges.
Their support is top notch, we did run into some minor issues when I first launched and their support was quick to act to make sure things were running smooth.
Their fees are reasonable if you have high volume of orders. To my surprise, I was also able to use the app for free shipping to specific regions instead of relying on Shopifyās native free shipping rules.
Though I understand the app ecosystem is there for the ability to do a little extra, Iām still in awe that @Shopify doesnāt consider combined shipping rates as an issue on the native platform. Proper shipping calculation shouldnāt be an app solution. Luckily we found Shipeasy to help us out for now. Iām still expecting Shopify to address this issue in their roadmap as it is just common sense.
Feel free to reach out if anyone has any questions.
Thanks so much for your speedy reply. Itās staggering that this isnāt a standard thing in Shopify, especially given that so many sellers are crying out for it!
Iāll take a look at this app and hopefully itāll be suitable for our needs.
I used to call @Shopify_77 every three months to raise the issue and they were less than helpful. Very kind people but every single suggestion they had went nowhere. App developers they recommended even admitted that Shopify built their shipping features where itās impossible to fix.
Not sure how this app did it. I recommend reaching out with your requirements and having them set up a trial run.
Looks like this is going to work for our 2 sites so thanks for pointing us in the right direction. Weāre in the process of setting it up now but looking good so far!