Follow this step-by-step guide to configure your Shopify store to sell Inkthreadable products to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Shopify offers two methods for handling shipping costs for your customers: price-based and weight-based.

We'll use weight-based rules as they allow you to mimic our shipping costs and ensure that customers always cover the postage cost.

Shipping costs vary by parcel weight and destination, so you'll be setting up a profile in Shopify to match Inkthreadable's pricing structure – easy peasy!

If this all sounds a bit overwhelming, don't panic – by the end of this guide, it'll all make perfect sense, and you won't ever have to do this again.

Let's get to it and set you up with shipping rates for worldwide fulfilment.
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This is an important step. If you don't change the default unit of weight, your store may calculate weights in imperial units and assign incorrect shipping rates during checkout.

Head to your Shopify dashboard, then click Settings > General to get started.

We will set the weight units to Kilograms (since this is used for the weight of Inkthreadable products).

Scroll down to the Store defaults section and change the Unit System to "Metric System" and the Default weight unit to "Kilogram (kg)".

​Click Save to apply the changes.

Changing these settings changes the default weights for calculating shipping.
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Since we're using weight-based shipping, you'll also need to make sure your products have weight values assigned to them.

If you're just getting started and don't yet have any products listed in your Shopify store, you can ignore this step for now.

Weights only need assigning if:

a. You had products listed in your store before integrating with Inkthreadable, and;

b. You want to use Inkthreadable to fulfil those products.

If this doesn't apply to you, you can jump to the next step. Though, it may be helpful to understand this method if you plan to create any products manually in the future.

Any products exported from Inkthreadable to Shopify will automatically have the correct weight values assigned to them. We recommend exporting products from Inkthreadable to your store for this reason, and you can always edit the finer details afterwards.

But if you already have some products that you created manually in your Shopify store, follow the process in the drop-down below to ensure your shipping is calculated correctly:

In the latest edition of Shopify, you must enable International markets before setting up worldwide shipping rates.

You may already have set this up during your Shopify onboarding, but we'll provide instructions for the most straightforward set-up that will allow you to ship to a worldwide market, just in case.

You only need to add additional markets if you intend to sell to these countries. You can limit your store to UK sales if that's your preference. If you'd like to set up international markets, follow the steps below.

Once you've assigned weights to each of your products and enabled the international market, we can move on to setting your shipping rates.

Before we get started, it's worth mentioning that the cost for each of your shipping rates don't need to match ours. We simply pass on the cost of shipping to you, and to keep this cost as low as possible, we don't make any profit ourselves from shipping your parcels.

You can charge your customers less to offer them cheaper shipping, more to increase your profit, or nothing at all if you want to offer free shipping. In each case, we'll still charge the rates listed on our site.

Head to your Shopify Dashboard > Settings > Shipping and Delivery to create your rates.

Click into your General shipping rates. This is where we'll add the rates to cover the products in your store.

Scrolling to the bottom of the page you'll see Inkthreadable Warehouse listed beneath the Not shipping from this location heading.

If you plan to sell only Inkthreadable products, you'll want the Inkthreadable Warehouse included in your shipping settings. There are two ways to do this.

Either of these methods will add the Inkthreadable Warehouse location to the Fulfilment locations for the rates we will be setting up next.

However, if you plan to sell products from a mixture of suppliers, or plan to ship some yourself, we'll need to separate the Inkthreadable Warehouse location before adding new rates.

To separate the Inkthreadable Warehouse location, scroll to the Not shipping from this location heading and select Create new rate from the dropdown. A new window will pop up. Create any rate on this window, we can edit it later. When you save, a new set of rates will appear on the Shipping and delivery page with Inkthreadable Warehouse as the fulfilment location. This will allow us to create rates that only apply to products fulfilled by Inkthreadable.

This guide is written as though the Inkthreadable Warehouse location has been added to the default fulfilment location rates, but the following steps also apply if you created a new set of rates for the Inkthreadable Warehouse location.

If you're using the default fulfilment rates you'll likely already have some set up automatically. Delete any existing rates so we can start from scratch.

To add new rates for your Inkthreadable products, click Add shipping zone button.

Name this first zone United Kingdom, and then search for this region to add the UK to the shipping zone. Click Done to save.

Your new zone should look like this:

Next, we'll create a new rate for the UK for each of the weight brackets available with each shipping method.

Inkthreadable currently offers 3 shipping methods to the UK:

You can find out about estimated delivery times for these methods on our shipping costs page.

We'll start by adding the rated for Royal Mail 48 Tracked.

This creates a rate for Royal Mail 48 Tracked to the UK, where the customer is charged £2.70 for shipping a parcel containing up to 100 g (a single t-shirt or similar).

To cover all weight brackets for the Royal Mail 48, Royal Mail 24, and Courier options you'll need to repeat the above steps using the information below.

The words "48 Tracked", "24 Tracked" and "Courier" are keywords detected by our API. They must be included in the rate names for us to receive the order correctly via the integration.

Not including these keywords may prevent the order coming to us for fulfilment, or may result in the wrong shipping method being assigned to the order. Learn more about keywords.

Once you're done, it'll look something like this:

Click Save at the top of the page. You've now set up your rates for the UK!

Setting up rates for Europe follows the same process as above but we need to put some extra work into defining the countries. To follow Inkthreadable's pricing we'll need to set up two shipping zones for Europe as costs vary between zone 1 and zone 2.

Click Add shipping zone and name it Europe Zone 1.

We now need to enter each country in zone 1 manually. Thankfully there aren't many:

Now, let's add the rates to this zone. The steps are the same as previous rates, following the table below:

Once these rates have been created, Save your changes.

It should look something like this:

The next step is to create the second zone for Europe. Click Add shipping zone and name it Europe Zone 2.

We'll need to add each country manually again, and unfortunately this time there are quite a few:

Now, let's add the rates to this zone. The steps are the same as previous rates, following the table below:

Click Save.

Your rates should look something like this:

Once you're done, you'll have two zones for Europe, each with 4 rates covering both tracked and courier shipping.
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Next, we're going to create a zone for the USA.

Click Add shipping zone and name it USA. Add United States of America to the shipping zones, then click Done and Save.

Add the rates to this zone to match the following table.

Click Save to apply these changes.

It should look something like this:

Click Create Zone, enter the 'Zone Name' Canada and select the Canada region to include all 13 provinces. Click Done and Save.

Then, follow the process Add rate using the details of this table:

It should look something like this:

Finally, we'll create rates for the rest of the world.

We'll add one final shipping zone that will include all remaining countries.

Click Add shipping zone and name it Rest of World. Rather than searching per country you can scroll down the list of available options and check the box next to each continent. This will select all countries within that continent and add them to the zone. Click Done and Save.

Using the same process as above, add the following rates.

Hit Save again to apply the changes.

It should look something like this:

And that's it. You've now created rates for all services shipping to all destinations!
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We recommend reviewing your shipping profile to double-check your condition columns and prices. It's so easy to accidentally type an extra 0 or forget to add a minimum weight, which could cause checkout errors for your customers.

We've provided screenshots to make it easy for you to check your profiles. Do it now!

At this stage, it's a good idea to add some products to your basket to see the shipping rates in action. Test different product combinations and shipping destinations to ensure your store calculates the prices correctly. If not, see our troubleshooting article.
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