Not a question, more of an observation. I’d love someone from Shopify to engage in this if possible.
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shipping/understanding-shipping/shipping-rates ← the change here to how ‘empty’ rates are handled is appalling; previously, if a merchant wanted to set a minimum order below which they wouldn’t handle it was straightforward to set a shipping rate threshold.
In a worked example: if the merchant wasn’t willing (or able) to ship an order less than, say, 10kg, then the first shipping rate option would start at 10kg. If the customer created a cart which weighed less than 10kg then they wouldn’t be offered a rate. This was a perfect setup.
There appears to be a change, which isn’t listed in the changelog, whereby:
If an order doesn’t match any shipping rates defined inSettings>Shipping and Delivery, then the order is assigned to the next higher available weight based shipping rate. For example, if there is a 2 kg order and a shipping rate only for 4 kg orders, then the customer is displayed the 4 kg shipping rate at checkout instead of an error message.
This is not a good change, and we’ll have a few stores for which they will now be getting orders which they can’t ship. The solution is ‘set a stupidly high price for the ‘missing’ band’ at the bottom, but this is not a solution, it’s a cludgy workaround.
In my opinion, there should be a separate flag in the Admin as to what to do in the case of a cart not matching on a rate - should it be offered the next rate up or just rejected. Having the rate automatically, without the merchant’s knowledge, set at the ‘next’ step is a very poor change and should be rethought.