Even just sorting by weight automatically would solve most of this, although drag-and-drop would be nicer for stores that deliberately want a different display order. It seems like one of those admin improvements that wouldn’t change the shipping logic at all but would make managing larger profiles much less painful.
No drag-and-drop for shipping rate ordering today, you’re right, and K’s auto-sort-by-weight idea would solve most of it with less engineering than full drag-and-drop. Until either lands, the workaround a lot of stores with big weight tables use is prefixing rate names with a number (“1 - Standard,” “2 - Express,” “3 - Heavy Item”) so they at least display in a predictable, auditable order in the admin - it doesn’t fix the underlying list, but it makes a 10+ band profile much easier to scan and sanity-check.
Worth also posting this in Shopify’s official Feedback forum if you haven’t already - Community feature threads don’t always get routed to the product team the way the dedicated Feedback board does, and admin usability requests like this one tend to get traction there.
If this answer helped, please mark it as solution.
Hello there @teslapartsco
This is definitely a nice to have quality of life enhancement for merchants with bigger shipping profiles. As rates are generated over time, they may not be in true order according to the weight progression, making the process of checking and maintaining 10 or more bands unnecessarily difficult.
A drag and drop facility, or even a manual sort control, would make these profiles a lot simpler to review and maintain, particularly for shops that use complicated weight based shipping.
To answer the documentation question directly: there is no rule against it. A carrier-calculated rate from one profile and a manual flat rate from another can appear in the same checkout. Profiles decide which products get priced by which ruleset, not which pricing method is allowed alongside which.
The constraint that actually bites is coverage. A cart draws from every profile its items belong to, and Shopify only shows shipping if every one of those profiles returns at least one rate. If one comes back empty, you do not get partial rates; you get “Shipping not available” for the whole cart. That is the shape you are describing — each product prices fine on its own; together they do not.
So the question is which profile is returning nothing. Worth three test carts: parcel items only, freight items only, then one of each. If the freight-only cart fails, that flat rate’s weight or price conditions are not being met by those items alone. If both pass alone and only the mixed cart fails, add a temporary manual rate to the parcel profile as a backstop — if the mixed cart then works, UPS was the empty one, and it returns nothing silently on an oversize piece rather than erroring.