Understanding Recharge’s shipping hierarchy and its integration with Shopify helps ensure accurate shipping rates for both checkout and recurring orders.

Use this guide to align shipping settings between Shopify and Recharge, ensuring accurate rates and avoiding conflicts or unexpected charges. The guide also outlines how shipping settings affect orders, highlighting their priority and direct impact on subscriptions.

Shipping options

Before exploring the shipping options, it's important to understand the two available choices and how they apply to your setup.

Retain shipping rates

Recharge applies the original checkout shipping rate to all future recurring orders to ensure consistent shipping rates at the customer level. Mixed carts can affect shipping rates, causing discrepancies for future orders.

Mixed carts (subscription + one-time purchase products):

• • Checkout: Shopify determines shipping costs by identifying the shipping profiles for each product in the cart and combining the lowest available rates for each item based on total weight and price. If products belong to different shipping profiles, Shopify may apply higher or unexpected shipping costs. See Combining shipping rates from different shipping profiles for more details.
  • Recurring orders: The shipping rate used at the checkout is retained for recurring orders, and the custom Recharge shipping profile, Recharge zones, or Shopify shipping rates determine the shipping rate. Since checkout pricing is calculated using the total weight and price of all products, the recurring shipping rates used might not always match the individual product's weight or price. To prevent this, consider using dynamic shipping rates.

For example, a $2 subscription product might retain free shipping because it was part of an initial $25 checkout order that qualified for free shipping because of the added price of a one-time product. But, in recurring orders, the $2 product alone wouldn’t normally meet the $20 minimum for free shipping, leading to a mismatch in expected rates as it retains the free shipping rate.

Dynamic shipping rates

Recharge pulls real-time shipping rates directly from your shipping profiles created in Shopify for both checkout and recurring orders, ensuring that any updates in Shopify's shipping rates are reflected in Recharge while providing the most current rates to your customers. For more details, see the Shipping setup guide: Shopify Checkout Integration.

For example, a customer places an order with a $10 subscription product and a $30 one-time product. At checkout, Shopify calculates the total weight and price of both items, applying a $5 shipping fee with Dynamic Shipping Rates. Recharge checks Shopify’s shipping settings during each renewal, so if Shopify updates the rate to $6, the customer will pay the updated price instead of the original $5 fee.

Manual shipping rates in Recharge

Manual rates in Recharge allow merchants to set custom shipping fees for individual customers, overriding all other subscription shipping settings. These rates ensure customers are charged a predetermined fee for future subscription orders. While Manual rates do not affect new checkout orders, which follow the shipping profile price assigned to the product, they do apply to future subscriptions linked to an address with a Manual rate. For more details on applying a manual shipping rate, see Editing shipping rates for an existing subscription.

Shopify Shipping Profiles

Merchants can set up general and custom shipping profiles in Shopify to manage shipping rates for different products and locations.

For one-time purchases and mixed carts (containing both subscription and one-time products), Shopify calculates shipping by combining rates from all relevant profiles based on the total weight and price of items in the cart. This combined rate is then applied at checkout.

• General shipping profile: Shopify automatically adds all newly created products to this profile, applying standard shipping rates unless specified otherwise. For more details, see Shipping profiles.
• Custom Shopify shipping profiles: Merchants can set specific shipping rates based on product types or shipping origins. Assigning products to these profiles overrides general rates. For more details, see Setting up shipping profiles.

Custom Recharge shipping profile in Shopify

Use the custom Recharge shipping profile in Shopify to set different shipping rates for subscription products. Recharge automatically creates this dedicated shipping profile in Shopify.

This profile governs the shipping rates for subscription items during checkout and recurring orders, provided the products are correctly assigned to this profile. If a subscription product doesn’t belong to this profile, Shopify uses the shipping rate assigned to the product's original shipping profile. For more details, see Creating a custom shipping profile for the Shopify Checkout Integration.

Recharge shipping Zones and Rates

Recharge allows define customizable shipping zones and rates for region-specific shipping configurations. Recharge recommends avoiding this setup, as this setup can create complex shipping pricing issues. Instead, consider using dynamic shipping rates with Shopify shipping profiles to adjust rates as needed. You can manually adjust the shipping rates for customers who want to retain them.

When enabled, Recharge Zones override all other shipping rates except for manual or retain rates set at the customer level.

For more details, see Recharge shipping zones and rates.

Considerations

Consider the following when configuring your shipping settings: