Some merchants may want to offer special shipping rates for their subscriptions. This guide has some tips and tricks to help with that.
Shopify Subscription Shipping Limitations
By default, a product will have the same shipping rate, whether bought as a one-time purchase or as part of a subscription.
Only the cheapest shipping rate is available when a product is purchased as a subscription. Customers can't choose between multiple shipping rates.
SOLUTION 1 - Discount codes
Creating a discount code like FreeSubscriptionShipping that makes shipping free for subscriptions only. With Shopify's subscription options for discount codes, you can configure the code to only apply to subscriptions.
SOLUTION 2 - Duplicate your product
Duplicating the entire product in your store, so you have a local pickup version and a shipping version of the product with different shipping zones in Shopify for each version.
For example, you can create a shipping zone/rule in Shopify that's free (or discounted) and assign it to the local pickup product only.
SOLUTION 3 - Add additional variants
Duplicate your variants or add an additional variant for the subscription option and make sure the shipping rule is only applied to that variant. For example...
Existing Product A
Has a shipping rule that applies to ALL variants and subscriptions that apply to all variants (this is the most common configuration for PayWhirl + Shopify).
Variant 1
Variant 2
Selling plan added on the product page so it applies to all variants
You can take that example above and add additional variants to the product for local pickup or apply a different shipping rate, in general, that only affects the new variants.
Existing Product A (modified)
Has two different shipping rules. One that applies to variants 1 & 2 for the normal shipping options, and another that applies to 1a & 2a that is for local pickup or modified as needed.
Variant 1
Variant 2
Variant 1a (local pickup)
Variant 2a (local pickup)
Selling plan added on the product page so it applies to all variants
Finally, in this shipping zone settings in Shopify, you can apply the shipping rate to specific variants only, OR to the entire product (which adds them to all variants).
Shipping options are usually selected in Shopify checkout, however, If you only associate your shipping rates with specific variants, versus the entire product, then the customer can select the "local pickup" variants on the product page and it will have a different shipping rate when they get to checkout.
This solution also works well if you need to modify the shipping rate for a subscription in general, so you have a different subscription shipping price for your normal one-time product variants.
Please let us know if you have any questions. We're happy to help.
Sincerely,
The PayWhirl Team