How to set different shipping rates for different products in Shopify

Not every product costs the same to ship.

A T-shirt might cost $5 to deliver, while a bulky item costs $30. If your Shopify store sells products with very different fulfilment requirements, using one shipping rate for everything can either hurt your margins or make shipping unnecessarily expensive for customers.

Fortunately, Shopify lets you set different shipping rates for different products.

How to set different shipping rates by product

For stores using Shopify's traditional shipping setup, you can use shipping profiles, found under:

Settings → Shipping and delivery → Shipping profiles

Your regular products can stay in your General shipping profile, while products requiring different rates can be moved into a custom profile. For example:

• Regular products: Standard Shipping, $8
• Bulky products: Bulky Delivery, $30

This works well when certain products have significantly different fulfilment costs.

Watch out for mixed carts

Things get more complicated when a customer buys products from multiple shipping profiles. Imagine:

• Regular product shipping: $8
• Bulky product shipping: $30
• A customer buys both.

Under Shopify's traditional shipping-profile setup, rates from different profiles can sometimes be combined at checkout. That's why you should always test:

• Regular products
• Bulky or special products
• Mixed carts
• Orders above and below free-shipping thresholds
• Different delivery destinations

Don't assume your shipping rule works because it looks correct in Shopify Admin. Check what your customer actually sees at checkout.

When shipping rules get complicated

Your requirements might eventually become:

• Free shipping above $100, except bulky products.
• Different rates for different countries.
• If the cart contains a product tagged "oversized", show bulky delivery.

Once your shipping logic starts involving multiple conditions, managing everything manually becomes harder.

Using Giraffe Shipping

We built Giraffe Shipping to make conditional Shopify shipping rules easier to create and test. For example, a standard workflow could be:

IF   the cart contains a product tagged "bulky"
THEN apply your bulky-product shipping rule

Or:

IF   the order is above $100
AND  there are no bulky products
THEN offer free shipping

You can also preview your rules before publishing them, so you know what customers should see before the changes reach your live checkout.

Keep shipping simple

If every product has the same shipping cost, Shopify's native settings may be all you need.

But if your shipping policy starts sounding like "Free shipping above $100, except these products, and only in these countries…", conditional shipping rules can make things considerably easier.

Whatever approach you use, always test different products, carts and destinations.

The most important shipping rate isn't the one you've configured. It's the one your customer sees.

Try Giraffe Shipping

Need more control over your Shopify shipping rules? Create conditional shipping rules, manage exceptions and preview what customers will see before going live.

Try Giraffe Shipping on the Shopify App Store →