This will allow you to set up shipping for self-fulfilled products which you are selling through your site such as originals, limited editions, or merchandise products you are fulfilling yourself (ie, not through Gooten). This method uses a weight-based system to determine the shipping cost for different products. This does take some setting up though, as every self-fulfilled product will need to have a weight value set up for it to be priced correctly.

Note: This is not necessary if you are only offering prints through a fulfillment vendor or merchandise fulfilled by Gooten. In this case you don’t need to make any changes to the default shipping method for your site, as those products will be using the methods set up by the respective vendor.

Note: You will need to know how much shipping will be for your products before you begin, so you will need to contact the shipping company you intend to use to get quotes for shipping packaged products. This will usually be based on the weight of the piece and the dimensions of the packaging. If you have a wide range of sizes of your products, you will need multiple quotes (3-5 to cover both smallest and largest, and some in the middle) to account for each. You may wish to also get quotes shipping to nearby and distant locations within the US. You may also want to limit shipping self-fulfilled orders to within the US in order to simplify this process at the start, as you can add additional destinations in the future.

Important: The Force Local Tax When Selected switch should only be turned on if you are setting up a Local Pick-up method for customers to pick up orders. This is usually only needed for artists who have a physical business location where orders can be collected. Enabling this will cause all orders placed with this shipping method enabled to automatically add sales tax for the state in which your business is located to be added at checkout, even if it’s not otherwise applicable to the order. Please refer to this article for more information: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/225933367-How-To-Create-An-In-Store-Pick-Up-Option

Note: The Available On Child Sites switch is a setting for “Parent” sites, functionality which is unavailable for new sites. This option has no effect in most cases and can be left set as On.

I’m going to turn this into three tiers, plus there will be a 0 weight tier to allow free shipping of Gift Cards through the site. As the weight values being used here don’t need to use real weight values, that can be set up to represent different groupings of products with the need to be exact. Also remember to account for any additional costs and build them into the costs you are charging your customers, although larger pieces generate more profit so some of that can be used to offset these.

Now we need to assign weight values to each, to keep the tiers clearly differentiated. A simple way is to start with a weight of 1 for the first non-zero tier, and multiply that by 10 for each subsequent tier.

Important: DO NOT USE THESE VALUES FOR YOUR SITE. You will need to use values which represent the costs that YOU are charging, and cover the sizes of your artwork.

Now you may have one size for your artwork, which would simplify the table significantly, however we would still always recommend having a 0 weight, $0 cost tier even if you don’t currently offer Gift Cards on your site.

Also if your artwork covers a much wider range of sizes, we would suggest grouping products into 3-5 collective groups (plus the $0 cost tier) to simplify your pricing. You shouldn’t be trying to exactly cover the shipping costs here, just group them so the shipping costs covers the average cost for each tier. (For more information about this approach, you may find the Learn: Everything You Need To Know About Shipping article here to be a useful read, especially the last section: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010862172-Learn-Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-Shipping-)

You will find the Weight field at the bottom of the Info tab of each Standard Store product, and each product on your site will need to be checked to ensure that they’ll be assigned the correct shipping cost at checkout.

This will allow you to set up shipping for self-fulfilled products which you are selling through your site such as originals, limited editions, or merchandise products you are fulfilling yourself (ie, not through Gooten). This method uses the value of the self-fulfilled products in the cart to determine the shipping cost for the order. Because it doesn’t require weight data to be added to each self-fulfilled product on your site,

Note: This is not necessary if you are only offering prints through a fulfillment vendor or merchandise fulfilled by Gooten. In this case you don’t need to make any changes to the default shipping method for your site, as those products will be using the methods set up by the respective vendor..

Note: You will need to know how much shipping will be for your products before you begin, so you will need to contact the shipping company you intend to use to get quotes for shipping packaged products. This will usually be based on the weight of the piece and the dimensions of the packaging. If you have a wide range of sizes of your products, you will need multiple quotes (3-5 to cover both smallest and largest, and some in the middle) to account for each. You may wish to also get quotes shipping to nearby and distant locations within the US. You may also want to limit shipping self-fulfilled orders to within the US in order to simplify this process at the start, as you can add additional destinations in the future.

Important: The Force Local Tax When Selected switch should only be turned on if you are setting up a Local Pick-up method for customers to pick up orders. This is usually only needed for artists who have a physical business location where orders can be collected. Enabling this will cause all orders placed with this shipping method enabled to automatically add sales tax for the state in which your business is located to be added at checkout, even if it’s not otherwise applicable to the order. Please refer to this article for more information: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/225933367-How-To-Create-An-In-Store-Pick-Up-Option

Note: The Available On Child Sites switch is a setting for “Parent” sites, functionality which is unavailable for new sites. This option has no effect in most cases and can be left set as On.

I’m going to turn this into three tiers, plus there will be a $0 tier to allow free shipping of Gift Cards through the site. Remember to account for any additional costs and build them into the costs you are charging your customers, although larger pieces generate more profit so some of that can be used to offset these.

Important: DO NOT USE THESE VALUES FOR YOUR SITE. You will need to use values which represent the costs that YOU are charging, using the prices of YOUR products, to ensure you are covering the shipping costs of your self-fulfilled products.

Now you may have one size and price for your artwork, which would simplify the table significantly, however we would still always recommend having a $0 subtotal, $0 cost tier even if you don’t currently offer Gift Cards on your site.

Also if your artwork covers a much wider range of sizes, we would suggest grouping products into 3-5 collective groups (plus the $0 tier) to simplify your pricing. You shouldn’t be trying to exactly cover the shipping costs here, just group them so the shipping costs you charge covers the average cost for each tier. (For more information about this approach, you may find the Learn: Everything You Need To Know About Shipping article here to be a useful read, especially the last section: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010862172-Learn-Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-Shipping-)

If you wish to offer free shipping automatically for products on your site, we now have a simple method to set this up automatically on your site. This is available for both self-fulfilled products (which you are shipping yourself), and also for products being fulfilled by your print vendor.

Note: Free shipping is not yet available for Gooten merchandise options.

Note: This is different from the method using a discount coupon, which is documented in the article Learn: Everything you need to know about Discount Coupons in the section Discounts on Shipping, which you can read here: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020382752-Learn-Everything-You-Need-To-Know-About-Discount-Coupons

Note: For self-fulfilled products you will need to know how much shipping will be for your products before you begin, so you will need to contact the shipping company you intend to use to get quotes for your products. While you don’t need to have set up costs in a shipping method for this for any self-fulfilled products, you should still know what the costs are so you can make sure they are accounted for in your product pricing, and ensure you will still make a profit on your sales. Once you have this information, you can look at building the shipping cost into your product pricing.

If you are setting this up for print products, you will need to either refer to your vendor’s shipping tables or on your live site add example products to your cart and go to the checkout page in order to see what the shipping cost will be, so you will be able to identify if you will need to increase your markups to absorb any shipping costs and ensure you will still profit from your sales.

IMPORTANT: This does not eliminate shipping costs for auto-fulfilled orders. You will still be charged shipping costs by your fulfillment partner. This is simply allowing you to easily implement your decision to not pass the cost of shipping these orders on to your customers, and you should have factored this cost into your product pricing already.

We strongly recommend setting a minimum cart subtotal requirement of at least $100, ideally more, if you wish to utilise this feature, as this will ensure that you'll be receiving an order large enough that the profit from the order will be able to at least partially absorb the accompanying shipping cost.

Important: The Force Local Tax When Selected switch should only be turned on if you are setting up a Local Pick-up method for customers to pick up orders. This is usually only needed for artists who have a physical business location where orders can be collected. Enabling this will cause all orders placed with this shipping method enabled to automatically add sales tax for the state in which your business is located to be added at checkout, even if it’s not otherwise applicable to the order. Please refer to this article for more information: https://artstorefrontssupport.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/225933367-How-To-Create-An-In-Store-Pick-Up-Option

Note: The Available On Child Sites switch is a setting for “Parent” sites, functionality which is unavailable for new sites. This option has no effect in most cases and can be left set as On.

On the Art Storefronts platform, it is possible to create free shipping methods without having to use a credit card. This applies to each customer Art Storefronts has and will work for Standard, Upload and Art Print stores.
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In this article we will show you how to create a shipping option that is completely free or discounted by a certain %. We will also show you how to create a shipping option that offers free shipping only after a certain cart subtotal amount.

Note: This feature allows you to override the price of any shipping method and will display and apply discounted shipping instead. However, you will still have to pay for shipping from your fulfillment partner. This is simply your decision to discount shipping for your own customer, likely because you have factored this cost into your product pricing already.