The shipping checklist to run after every change to your store
Shipping configuration does not drift on its own: it breaks when one of five specific things changes it, which makes the discipline cheap. An import, an app, a location, a country added to Markets, or a delivery profile edited. If none of those happened, your rates behave today exactly as they did yesterday. When one of them does happen, four test carts, chosen so each isolates a different class of failure, tell you within minutes whether anything is now unshippable, and the pattern of which carts fail names the cause before you open a single settings screen.
The five changes that break shipping
Shipping configuration does not rot on its own. It breaks when something specific changes it, and there are only five of those. If none of them happened, your rates are the same today as yesterday.
- A bulk product import or bulk edit, which is where the physical-product flag and weights get lost.
- Installing or removing an app that touches shipping, carriers, bundles, subscriptions or print on demand.
- Adding a location, or changing which locations fulfil online orders.
- Adding a country to Markets, which does not add it to any shipping zone.
- Creating or editing a delivery profile, or moving products onto one.
The check itself, four carts
Each cart isolates one class of failure, so the pattern of which ones fail names the cause without any further investigation.
- Cheapest, lightest product, main country. Fails only when something broad is wrong: a bracket that does not start at zero, or a product flagged as not needing delivery.
- Heaviest product, main country. Isolates an upper bracket that stops too low.
- A product on a custom delivery profile, to a country you rarely ship to. Isolates the profile-versus-zone mismatch, which never shows up in domestic testing.
- A product whose stock sits only at your secondary location. Isolates a location that cannot fulfil online orders.
Place them as real checkouts rather than through Test rates. Test rates answers “what does this address see”, which is a different question from “is anything in my store unshippable”, and it does not exercise locations or carrier calls.
What to look at when one fails
Two questions narrow six causes to one or two, and they are worth asking before opening any settings screen.
- Every country, or only some? Only some means the delivery profile or the zone. Every country means products, brackets or the carrier.
- Every product, or only some? Only some means the physical-product flag, the profile assignment, or the location holding that product's stock. Every product means the zone or the brackets.
The five-minute version, for after a small change
- One test order to your main country with a normal product.
- One test order to your most distant market.
- If you imported products: export them again and sort on
Requires Shippingand on weight.
That catches most of it. The four-cart version is for after an app install, a new location or a profile change, which are the ones that fail selectively.
Check the whole store instead of one setting
RateGuard reads your products, delivery profiles, zones, brackets and locations and names the specific setting that returns no rate at checkout. Read-only: it can see your shipping configuration and cannot change it, and it is never given customer or order data.
- Five of the six documented causes checked in full, carrier-calculated rates in part
- Three free scans for the lifetime of the store, PDF report included, no card
- Every finding names the admin screen and the field to change
Written 14 August 2026. Admin paths reflect the Shopify admin as of that date; Shopify moves settings occasionally, and this page is re-checked when it does.