You may want to provide free shipping to your customers, especially if they sign up for a subscription. This guide provides advice on setting up shipping in Shopify and ReCharge depending on the specific free shipping scenario.
Free shipping on subscription and one-time products
If you offer free shipping on your products, regardless of the type of product or where the customer is located, you can simply set your ReCharge Shipping settings to Do not charge shipping.
Free shipping on subscription products
If you just want to offer free shipping on subscription products and not on one-time products in the cart, we recommend setting up a weight-based shipping rate:
- Set up a weight-based shipping rate in Shopify that specifies 0lb/kg products receive free shipping.
- For your subscription products, adjust the weight of the hidden, auto-renew product to be 0.
- In Settings > Shipping, under Advanced Settings select Duplicate product from the Shipping rate product type dropdown.
- For the original product, make sure it has a weight that is not 0 and that you have a shipping rate available for products over 0lbs/kgs. In the case of a mixed cart, the one-time item will register a positive shipping rate.
Free shipping on the first charge only
If you want to offer free shipping on the first charge only after which a different shipping rate will be applied you would need to use our Workflows tool. This tool enables the change of subscription order parameters from one charge to the next and one of the parameters that can be changed is the applied shipping rate.
The other way to accomplish free shipping on the first charge only is to create a free shipping discount code as per our Creating discount codes.
The shipping discount code will always fully discount the shipping cost. It cannot be applied to specific products or collections and cannot be limited to one application per customer meaning that once applied this discount will set the shipping to be free for the entire duration of the subscription.
Check package weights
Shopify places a default weight on packages in their Shipping settings. This can lead to the free shipping rate not working if you use weight-based rates. For example, if you have a product that is 1lb and a shipping rate from 0-1lb that is $4.99, then the shipping rate will not work.
To fix:
- In Shopify, click Settings and select Shipping.
- Scroll down to the Packages section and click Edit next to the default package.
- Set the weight to 0.
- Click Save.