If you’ve decided to set up your Shopify store shipping manually, you have several setup options available. This guide is divided into three sections, based on difficulty level. Generally speaking, the greater the number of different products you’re going to sell, the more advanced your shipping setup should be.

If you’d like to avoid manual shipping setup altogether, check out the Printify Shipping Calculator for Shopify users.

In this article:

• Free shipping
• Easy setup
• Advanced setup
• Troubleshooting

Free shipping

Consider this workaround option if you don’t want to spend much time setting up shipping. It means that you will raise each product's retail price to absorb the shipping cost that way. Use Printify’s shipping rates to determine how much you should raise the retail price.

Please note: In Printify, you will still be charged with shipping costs as usual. Using this method, you are charging the customer with the shipping cost already included in the retail price.

How to set it up

1. Create and publish your Printify products, setting the retail price a bit higher – increase it based on our shipping rates.

For example: Your desired retail price for a t-shirt is $17.99. The shipping cost of your chosen Print Provider is $4 (within the USA). Set your final retail price to be 17.99 + 4 = $21.99.

2. From your Shopify admin, go to “Settings” → “Shipping and delivery”. Next to “General shipping rates”, click “Manage rates”.

3. Delete any existing rates generated by Shopify (for all shipping zones).

4. For the Domestic (USA) shipping zone, add the free shipping rate: Click Add rate. Enter the name for the rate (for example, “Free shipping”). Make sure that the value of the “Price” field is 0. Click Save.

5. Optional: Consider a way of making your products available to international customers as well. You may want to create a duplicate product with a price inclusive of international shipping and that is specifically intended for international customers.

As an alternative solution: if you have a bit more time to spare, you may want to add international shipping zones to the same “general shipping profile”. However, be mindful of the fact that the rates you add will apply to all of your products, because they all currently are in the same shipping profile (see Advanced setup if you’d like to learn more about creating custom shipping profiles).

6. As the final step, navigate to your storefront and test your shipping setup by putting some products in the shopping cart (see Troubleshooting, if necessary).

Easy setup

This will be the right option for you if you’re starting out with a few products that are all of the same product type – such as all shirts, all phone cases, or all leggings. To make things a bit easier, our recommendation is to choose the same Print Provider for all of them.

Let’s say you want to sell 5 different models of shirts, each with a different design. If you choose the same Print Provider for all of them, it means that no matter how the customer combines the products within their shopping cart, the shirts can be combined at a reduced shipping rate.

In Printify, the same thing will happen – if the order contains multiple products of the same type and printed by the same Print Provider, the shipping costs will be combined at a reduced rate.

How to set it up

1. Create and publish your Printify products, making sure you’re using the same Print Provider. The product type should also be of the same category (based on the categories within our shipping rates).

All of your published products will automatically be added to the “general shipping profile” in Shopify.

2. From your Shopify admin, go to “Settings” → “Shipping and delivery”. Next to “General shipping rates”, click “Manage rates”.

3. Delete any existing rates generated by Shopify (for all shipping zones).

4. Create the first rate and input the shipping rate, which is $4 for a single shirt (within the US), if choosing the Print Provider Stoked on Printing.

In this example, we’ll use weight-based conditions. We will assign the weight of 0.5 lb to a single shirt (can be another product – the actual product weight doesn’t matter, since we’re just using this to differentiate the product quantity).

It’s up to you how you choose to call your shipping rates, but we recommend using “Shipping” based on Shopify’s rate naming guidelines.

5. Calculate and add the rates for orders with multiple products. The cost of each additional shirt from Stoked on Printing is $2.

You can add up to as many as you wish, however, our recommendation would be to add a minimum of 5 products. When setting up each new rate condition, you will need to use a weight range that starts immediately after the previous weight range, as shown below:

6. These steps describe how to set it up for one shipping zone – Domestic (USA). Repeat the same process to add other shipping zones to the same “general shipping profile”. Typically, merchants will add at least 3 shipping zones: Domestic (USA), Canada, Rest of the World (International).

7. As the final step, navigate to your storefront and test the rates by putting some products in the shopping cart (see Troubleshooting, if necessary).

If you later decide that you’d like to add another product type to your selection – for example, a phone case – please be aware that to charge the accurate shipping cost, you’ll need to create a new shipping profile for that product (see Advanced setup).

Advanced setup

Choose this option if you’re selling a combination of different products, for example: t-shirts, phone cases, socks, posters.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand how Printify combines shipping rates.

Shipping rates are combined at a reduced rate only for products that:

• Are of the same product type (for example, shirts);

• Are also fulfilled by the same Print Provider.

In all other cases, the shipping rates will be individually calculated – you’ll be charged with the full shipping cost for each product in the order. This makes it a bit more complex to set up your store shipping to charge the accurate amount. However, this can be done thanks to Shopify’s custom shipping profiles.

How to set it up

1. Create and publish your Printify products. All of your published products will automatically be added to the “general shipping profile” in Shopify.

2. From your Shopify admin, go to “Settings” → “Shipping and delivery”. Next, click on “Create new profile”.

The idea is to create a new shipping profile for each product. However, if the products are of the same product type and same Print Provider, then such products can share the same shipping profile.

3. Let’s say your first shipping profile is for a shirt by Stoked on Printing. Create a name for your shipping profile (for example, “T-shirt (Stoked on Printing)”) and add the applicable products to it.

4. Create the first shipping zone (for example, “Domestic”) and input its shipping rate, which is $4 for a single shirt (within the USA).

In this example, we’ll use weight-based conditions to create combined shipping rates within each shipping profile. We will assign the weight of 0.5 lb to a single shirt (this can be any other product – the actual product weight doesn’t matter, since we’re just using this to differentiate the product quantity).

It’s up to you how you choose to call your shipping rates, but we recommend using “Shipping” based on Shopify’s rate naming guidelines.

5. Calculate and add the rates for additional quantities of the same product. The cost of each additional shirt from Stoked on Printing is $2.

You can add up to as many as you wish, however, our recommendation would be to add up to a minimum of 5 products. When setting up each new rate condition, you will need to use a weight range that starts immediately after the previous weight range, as shown below:

6. The above steps describe how to set it up for one shipping zone – Domestic (USA). Repeat the same process to add other shipping zones to the same custom shipping profile. Typically, merchants will add at least 3 shipping zones: Domestic (USA), Canada, Rest of the World (International).

7. Repeat the same steps to create more shipping profiles for your products and add their applicable shipping rates.

8. As the final step, navigate to your storefront and test the rates by putting some products in the shopping cart. We recommend doing 2 tests:

• First test: add 2-3 different products (from different profiles) to the shopping cart, to see if the total shipping cost consists of the full shipping fees for each product.

• Second test: add 1 product to the cart and increase the quantity to check if the correct shipping rates are applied for multiples of the same product (a reduced rate).

Please note: While this method will work as intended, it is not ideal if you want to sell more than 20 unique products. In that case, consider using our Shipping Calculator, which will automatically add the correct rates to all of your Printify products.

Alternatively, group the products together under the same shipping profiles if they have a similar shipping rate, while also increasing the “additional item” cost to avoid undercharging the customer.

Troubleshooting

• No rates are being generated at checkout – it could be caused by a number of things, for example: the customer’s selected delivery location is not covered by your shipping zones, so they are unable to check out, or the quantity of products in the cart exceeds the number of products you have set up shipping rates for. This can be easily fixed by editing your shipping profiles and adding the required parameter.

• Incorrect rates are generated at checkout – it is likely that there is an issue with the default product weights. Edit the weight of the product and set it to be 0.5 lb across all its variants. That will allow it to fall within the correct weight range for the correct shipping rate to be applied. The actual weight of any particular product doesn’t matter, but it’s important to make sure that the assigned product weight on the Shopify side matches the shipping setup you’ve created.

Need some extra help with your shipping setup? Get in touch with our Merchant Support team by clicking on the chat bubble.