Charging an exact flat rate on Shopify is quite challenging. Due to the way in which Shopify calculates shipping rates, it is not possible to mirror the exact flat shipping rates that Gelato offers.

Current Shopify limitation

Currently, Shopify has a limitation that prevents the shipping fee for an additional item belonging to the same product type from being calculated upon checkout. For this reason, you only see the first product shipping charges applied. This happens when more than one product using the same shipping profile is ordered.

This means that, if your customer in the USA purchases two 8X12" posters in the same order, Gelato will charge you (as per the table below) $5.12 + $0.35 which is $5.47

However, for this order, Shopify will charge your customer only $5.12 (shipping for only 1 poster) for shipping.

In the next section, we suggest some workarounds you can choose from.

Workaround 1: Use Live rate shipping

Using live rates means that upon checkout, live shipping prices and delivery estimates will be calculated and presented. Your customers will then be able to choose from the method they prefer (including express methods).

This feature is included in the Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus plans but it can also be added to any plan for a monthly fee payable to Shopify. You will also require a Gelato+ subscription to activate this.

You can read more about this feature in our article How do I automatically apply Gelato live shipping. prices to my Shopify store?

Workaround 2: Add an Arbitary Weight for Weight-based rates

You can assign an arbitrary weight value to products and set up shipping in Shopify for it to charge shipping based on Geographical area and the "weight" of the order

Learn more about setting up shipping rates on Shopify's documentation. You can also contact Shopify support if you have questions about how to set this up in Shopify.

Setting it up

You sell posters in 2 sizes - 30x40cm and 70x100cm. To match our flat shipping rates,

Setting it up this way means, for an order for ten 30x40cm posters then it would automatically calculate the order total weight as 500g and charge the next tier, i.e. €5.55. This is not optimal, but could be a workaround to consider.

Workaround 3: Include the Shipping Cost in your Retail Price and offer Free Shipping

You can also include the flat-rate cost of shipping to your main markets when setting your product retail prices. By including the cost of shipping in your retail price, you can also choose to offer your products with free shipping.

Example

Your customers are mainly from the USA, Canada, and the UK. However, you also have a few customers from countries in the Europe cluster. The screenshot shows our flat rate shipping prices for the 30x40cm/12x16" poster

Gelato will charge you €6.55 to produce this poster and the automatically suggested retail price is €9.17. It is completely up to you to set a higher or lower price.

Since the shipping cost to Europe (one of your markets) is €5.10 this is higher than the one for the USA. You can consider selling your poster at €14.99 (rounded up) which will safely cover both the product and shipping costs.

You can check which clusters the different countries belong to in the list in our article What countries are included in each geographical area used for flat shipping price?

Workaround 4: Use a third-party Shopify app to manage shipping

If you still wish to use our flat rate shipping prices and do not wish to use any of the above suggestions, you can also choose to use a third-party app such as Shipping Rates ‑ Shipeasy or Advanced Shipping Rules to set up additional shipping rules for the additional items in Shopify.