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Documentation Welcome Build a product-based shipping rate

Build a product-based shipping rate

You have products to ship and it costs money to ship them. One of the most powerful features of Parcelify is the ability to assign shipping costs to every group of products you sell.

We call these assignments ‘Prices’ and they exist inside your shipping rates. Rates can have as many Prices as you need to define shipping for all the products in your shop and they are added together to form the total shipping price that is shown for this rate at checkout.

So, when you want a product-based shipping costs, you really want a single shipping rate with product-based prices. Let’s show you how!

The Gardening Shop

In this example, let’s suppose you sell three different kinds of products: seed packets, gardening tools, and planting pots.

  • Seed Packets are light and easy to ship, so you charge $1 no matter how many packets are purchased since you can fit them all in a single bubble mailer
  • Gardening tools - you can fit about 3 in a small box and up to 10 in a large box. These boxes cost $3.99 and $8.99 respectively and you want to charge for as few boxes as possible
  • Planting pots are heavy and somewhat fragile, so you palletize them by weight. To keep things simple, we will say this works out to $2 per kilogram

For a simple shop, this is a sophisticated combination of different shipping requirements for different products. As you will see in the steps ahead however, all you have to do is define prices for these products and we take care of the rest.

Basic setup

First, we need to go through some basic setup.

  1. Go ahead and install Parcelify if you haven’t already
  2. Open our app. You can find it in your Shopify admin dashboard, under Apps, listed as Shipping Rates by Parcelify
  3. Add a Location. This is where your products ship from
  4. Select your newly added Location and click [Add Shipping Zone]
  5. Give this zone a recognizable name, then click [Add Countries] to tell us where you ship to.
  6. Click [Save] in the top-right

Now lets get to building our rate.

Start a new rate

  1. Inside your shipping zone, click [Add shipping rate] or [New shipping rate]
  2. At the top of the page you will see the current Location and Zone this rate will be created in
  3. Below that, give the rate a helpful name and description. This is what your customers will see at checkout, along with the shipping price
  4. Scroll down to the section called Prices.
  5. You are now ready to start adding your product shipping prices

Price 1: Seed Packets

First, let’s add $1 to the shipping amount any time seed packets are in the cart. We will assume the product type for these are, unsurprisingly, seed packets.

Every new rate comes with a default flat-rate price. This is close to what we want, but we only want this price to apply to seed packets - and we want to charge more than $0. So, let’s make some changes

  1. Change the default price from ( ) Flat rate to (o) Products
  2. Next to the new PRODUCTS section that appears, click Add restriction
  3. Use the dropdown to select Product type is, then enter seed packets into the adjacent text box
  4. At the bottom of this Price, in the section labeled PRICE, change the 0 to a 1. This is how much will be added to the rate total when the product you designated is in the cart
  5. Click [Done] on this Price. Just two more to go!



Price 2: Gardening Tools

Moving along, lets set up our gardening tools Price. We know we want 1-3 tools to ship for $3.99, 4-10 tools to ship for $8.99, and any more than that to go in the next appropriately sized box. For simplicity, the product type for these will simply be tools, and we will place them in a tiered price based on how many products are ordered. Here’s how:

  1. Click [New price]
  2. Change the default price from ( ) Flat rate to (o) Products
  3. Next to the new PRODUCTS section that appears, click Add restriction
  4. Use the dropdown to select Product type is, then enter tools into the adjacent text box
  5. We want the shipping cost of these gardening tools to be based on how many are in the cart, so under PRICE / How to charge, click the dropdown and select Item based
  6. We have two different tiers to address - small and large boxes - so click the (o) Tiered prices radio button
  7. Now enter the information for boxing these tools into a small box
    • Your start quantity will be 1
    • Your end quantity will be 3
    • The price for this tier will be 3.99
  8. One more tier to enter. Click (+) Add tier and enter:
    • Start quantity: 4
    • End quantity: 10
    • Price: 8.99

    Parcelify will automatically roll-over to the next smallest tier when the amount for the largest tier is exceeded. If you wish to limit this price to a specific number of products, add a Quantity Restriction (located above your ranges)

  9. Click [Done] on this price. One more to go!



Price 3: Planting Pots

For our final Price, we want to add $2 to the amount for every kilogram of planting pots in the cart. Following our last two Prices, we will assume the product type for these pots is planting pots.

  1. Click [New price]
  2. Change the default price from ( ) Flat rate to (o) Products
  3. Next to the new PRODUCTS section that appears, click Add restriction
  4. Use the dropdown to select Product type is, then enter planting pots into the adjacent text box
  5. We want the shipping cost of these planting pots to be based on how much they weigh, so under PRICE / How to charge, click the dropdown and select Weight based
  6. Since we are charging per kilogram, we’ll keep the default (o) Per Kilogram radio button selected
  7. Enter the amount we will charge per kilogram for these pots at the bottom of this price: 2
  8. Click [Done] one last time
  9. Don’t forget to click [Save] in the top-right



Testing at checkout

After adding or editing a rate we recommend always performing a quick test checkout to make sure everything is working to your satisfaction. You’ll get peace of mind knowing your rate is showing as expected, and you’ll catch any issues (like a misspelling or misplaced decimal) well before it can affect your customers.

Exactly what kind of test you do should be based on how you’ve built your shipping rate. In this example we can perform a single checkout that will test all three prices at once.

  • To test the first price, we will add 10 seed packets.
    Expected price: $1
  • To test the second price, we will add 11 gardening tools. This should fill one large box and overflow into 1 small box.
    Expected price: ($8.99 + 3.99) = $12.98
  • Finally, we will add 2 planting pots to test the last price. These weigh a total of 10kg
    Expected price: (10kg * $2/kg) = $20

The final shipping cost for 10 seed packets, 11 gardening tools, and 2 planting pots should cost is: $33.98

How does this look once you have it all set up?



Exactly how you’d expect.

That’s all there is to it. From here you can continue customizing this rate, check out our tutorials, head back to our home page, or continue reading to see how to restrict a product from a shipping area:

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