I’ve reached out to multiple people at Shopify regarding this. Same answer every time. “This is desired when merchants are shipping items from multiple warehouses and do need to collect shipping costs for multiple areas.” When you explain that all shipping happens from one location they acknowledge that it could be a nuisance but just say this is how it’s 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, ‘Shopify has made it impossible to achieve this.’
- Use a separate warehouse 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 Partner’s tested all of Shopify’s 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 there’s no simple solution for this right away. We’ve 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 don’t have a specific timeline on when this shipping scenario will be added to our roadmap so I can’t say for sure when to expect an update on it. If you’d like to discuss the current available workarounds on a call, just let me know.