Shopify Shipping: A quick overview of shipping profiles and blended rates
Shopify's shipping system can be overwhelming. Indeed, for many of our clients, shipping is one of the toughest areas to completely understand within the platform.
With that in mind, here's a very brief overview of how Shopify's native shipping works for stores with multiple locations. For the purposes of this overview, let's assume that you already have your locations set up.
Shopify's shipping natively works off of shipping profiles and each product can be assigned to a single shipping profile.
Each shipping profile can have unique locations (your inventory locations) that it ships from.
Each location within a shipping profile can have specific zones (countries, states/provinces) to which it ships.
Each zone can have its own shipping options and rates.
Each profile can fulfill from multiple locations. One product can be available to ship from multiple locations, but only in a single profile, and its shipping options and rates can be set up differently depending upon where the item is fulfilled from. (You can learn more in the official help documentation.)
| Location A | Location B |
| Shipping zone 1 (countries/states) | Shipping zone 1 (countries/states) |
| Rates | Rates |
| Shipping zone 2 (countries/states) | Shipping zone 2 (countries/states) |
| Rates | Rates |
Natively, Shopify separates items that are in unique shipping profiles or shipping from different locations* and creates a blended shipping rate by adding up the lowest shipping option for each part of the order. (*This would include items from Collective vendors, pre-orders, drop shipping apps, etc.)
If the order contains two items from the same shipping profile, but each shipping from a different location, each of those items will have a shipping fee.
The goal here is noble, but the execution can be tough to understand at times leading to a very common point of confusion.
This is why many Shopify merchants rely on shipping apps and experts (like us!) to help enhance the shipping process, or set it up to work the way it's needed.
Shopify has recently introduced split shipping at checkout which adds additional visibility and control.
