ReCharge uses the shipping rates you have set in Shopify to apply shipping, both at checkout and for recurring orders. With that in mind, there are recommended configurations for your shipping settings in Shopify to optimize the available shipping rates for your subscription customers. Additionally, ReCharge has settings within the ReCharge app that you can leverage for your recurring orders. This guide highlights the basics of shipping and how to configure your shipping rates.
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Before you begin
- Shipping rates will be calculated based on what is configured within Shopify. Restrictions on which countries you do and don't to ship to will also be applied.
- You can also offer free shipping on all items in the cart. However, please note that this will apply to both one-time and subscription items.
- Price-based shipping rates do not work well with ReCharge due to the Shopify API limitations. Their API only takes the variant and address of the order as input and relies on the price of the product as set in Shopify. In other words, any price reductions that impact the order (for example, an applied discount code) will not be taken into consideration when presenting the available shipping rates.
- If you need to configure your taxes as well, please take a look at Taxes Setup
Step 1 - Access shipping settings
Click on Settings and then select Shipping.
Step 2 - Offer free shipping
To offer free shipping to all of your customers, leave Charge Shipping unchecked. Otherwise, if you want to charge shipping, please ensure to keep this option checked to the default setting.
Step 3 - Select countries to ship to
If you do not ship to all countries, you will have to restrict the countries to which you ship to. To do so, expand the Select Country option and choose the countries to which you want to restrict shipping. Once this is done, click Add country. Repeat this process for all countries which you’d like to ship to.
Step 4 - Shipping rate style
The shipping rates for recurring orders can either be set to Dynamic or Retain.
Dynamic: Shipping rates will be recalculated every time for the recurring orders. For example, if someone bought an expedited rate for their first order, their next one would default to the cheapest option. That is unless it's been manually overwritten for a specific customer.
Retain: Shipping rate of the recurring orders will be the same as the rate they got when they first signed up. This is useful if you use Pick Up shipping rates or to use it for delivery locations. Please also notice that if you select Conserve, you will be able to adjust the shipping lines on your side as well. For more information on editing shipping lines, please check out our Edit Shipping Rates article.
Step 5 - Blocking orders
You can block orders which do not contain a matching shipping rate and instead display an error. Setting this option will restrict orders by state/zip code or to a third-party shipping rate ruleset.
If you'd like to test this and see your shipping calculated on the checkout, be sure to enter an address in order for the system to generate the shipping charges.
If you want to apply notes for subscription order types, let us know and we can enable this for your store.
Warning: Unfortunately, Shopify places a default weight to packages. If you have a product that is 1lb and a shipping rate from 0-1lb that is $4.99, then the shipping rate will be wrong because of the package default weight. Be sure to check and remove weight from these packages.
Free shipping on subscription products
For free shipping on subscription items within the cart you will:
- Set up a shipping rate in Shopify where the weight of 0 has free shipping.
- For your subscription products, adjust the weight of the hidden auto renew product in Shopify to be zero if you want free shipping on only subscription products. Otherwise, you'd change the weight to zero for both the original and the hidden product to have free shipping for both.
- For your one-time items, make sure they have a weight that is not zero. As a result of this, if someone buys just the subscription product, they will get a free shipping rate because the weight of the cart is zero.
Free shipping on first charge only
When you add a product to a subscription ruleset, ReCharge creates a duplicate hidden product called auto-renew. ReCharge uses this auto-renew product to process the first order. Any recurring orders use the original product.
- Change the weight of the duplicate auto renew product to a weight that is different than the original product.
- Set two shipping rates: one that will apply to the weight of the auto-renew product and one that will apply to the weight of the original product.
- In the first order, ReCharge will process the rate of the auto-renew product. The recurring orders afterward will be processed with the rate of the original product.
Note: When you re-sync the product, it resets the information on the auto-renew product. However, it does keep the same weight, so you can keep the shipping rules working as configured. Make sure when you set up the rates that you do it based on weight, not price. Shopify's price-based shipping doesn't work so well. So make the hidden product like 3.49lb or something similar and make a shipping rate in Shopify where 3.49lb orders get $3.49 shipping rate. Then make the original product 0lb with a Free Shipping for 0 weight orders.
Shipping Zones
You can use shipping zones to choose the regions that you ship to and their corresponding shipping rates for each zone. These rates will show up on the next page of the checkout after the user enters their address. You may also review your tax settings after adding a country to a shipping zone. The following example is how one store has configured its shipping zones in Canada. These are set to charge more as the weight of the box increases.
As you can see below, this same store is based out of the U.S, so the rates for those within their country are more affordable.
So in this case, the U.S would be domestic. Specific shipping rates have been made for Canada and the U.S, but all the other countries still remain. For this store, they have grouped countries up in a few international clusters with the same rate that look like this.
You may need to configure rates for more weight. This store has set up all the way to 200lbs, but these screenshots cut that off since it's quite long.