Shopify: Hide a Shipping Method for Specific Products

Some products cannot travel every way you ship. Frozen food should not wait two days in a pickup point. Lithium batteries and aerosols are often excluded from air and express services. Wine needs a delivery where someone checks the buyer’s age. A sofa will not fit the courier that brings your T-shirts. Yet Shopify checkout happily shows every method to every cart.

This guide covers what Shopify’s shipping profiles can do for this, where mixed carts break the plan, and how to hide a shipping method only when a certain product is in the cart.

What Shopify does on its own: shipping profiles

Shopify’s built-in tool is the shipping profile. You put products in a custom profile and give that profile its own zones and rates. Products in that profile only get the rates you set there, so if the profile for batteries has no express rate, a cart with only batteries never sees express.

For a catalogue where each group ships alone, that is enough. Two things get in the way for most shops:

• Mixed carts combine rates. When a cart has products from different profiles, Shopify adds rates with the same name together. When the names do not match, it adds the cheapest rate from each profile and shows the sum under one name, Shipping (Shopify Help Center: Combined shipping rates). Put a battery and a T-shirt in one cart and the buyer can lose the choice between standard and express, or see one combined rate with a name you never set up.
• Pickup and local delivery belong to your locations, not to profiles. A shipping profile does not remove a pickup point option for chilled products.

Profiles also mean keeping several copies of your zones and rates in step. Every rate change has to be made in each profile.

The rule-based way: hide the option for the cart

The alternative is to keep one simple set of rates and add rules that run at checkout: “when the cart contains a product tagged frozen, hide pickup points”. Shopify supports this through delivery customizations, a type of Shopify Function that can hide, rename or reorder the delivery options shown at checkout. Shopify lists “Hide delivery options for certain products or customers” as a use case (shopify.dev: Delivery Customization Function API).

You can build such a function yourself in a custom app, or use an app that ships one. Public apps with functions work on every Shopify plan; custom apps that contain functions need Shopify Plus (shopify.dev: Shopify Functions).

Plan the rule before you build it

1. Mark the products. A product tag such as frozen or lithium-battery is the most flexible. A collection, product type, vendor or SKU works too.
2. Decide what “in the cart” means. Hide express when any item is a battery. Offer a cheap letter rate only when every item fits in a letter. Show a white-glove option only when no item is small.
3. Name the options to hide. By method (shipping, local delivery, pickup) or by title, such as every option whose title contains Express. If your rate names are translated, prefer the method.
4. Leave at least one option. A rule that hides everything leaves the buyer stuck at checkout. If nothing can ship, block checkout with a clear message instead of an empty list.
5. Test the mixed cart. One restricted product plus one normal one is where most rules go wrong.

Hiding changes which options the buyer sees, not what they cost. If a product needs a higher price, that is still a job for your rates or a profile.

Common product rules

Products	Typical rule
Chilled and frozen food	Hide pickup points and slow services
Lithium batteries, aerosols	Hide air or express services
Alcohol	Hide pickup points, or block destinations you do not ship to
Bulky or heavy items	Hide the parcel courier and letter rates
Pre-orders	Hide same-day local delivery

These are shipping preferences, not legal advice. Your carrier’s terms decide what it accepts.

Where Livra: Postcode Shipping Rules fits

Livra: Postcode Shipping Rules is an app that hides, renames or moves delivery options and blocks checkout with rules that run as Shopify Functions, without theme changes.

• Product conditions. Product tag, Collection, Product type, Vendor or SKU (a SKU ending in * matches every SKU that starts with it), with Any item has one of, Every item has one of or No item has any of.
• Pick the options. Hide by Delivery methods (shipping, local delivery, pickup and others) or by Title contains or Title is exactly.
• Product templates. Ready-made rules for chilled and frozen goods, alcoholic drinks, products of animal origin, and batteries and dangerous goods, with suggested tags. They start by hiding pickup points, or options whose title contains “Express” for batteries, and they are created switched off so you can review them first.
• Combine with address and cart. Add a postcode, country, cart weight or customer condition to the same rule.
• Simulator. Build a mixed cart and an address and see which options checkout would show.

The app does not change shipping prices; it works on the options your shipping settings already offer. Shopify keeps the cheapest shipping rate first among shipping rates, so a move never puts a dearer rate ahead of it. Each store can have up to 200 rules. See the app’s page.

FAQ

Can I hide a shipping rate for one product without an app? With shipping profiles, yes, as long as that product ships alone. In a mixed cart Shopify combines the profiles’ rates, and pickup options are not part of a profile. For rules on the whole cart you need a delivery customization function.

Why does my checkout show one rate called “Shipping”? The cart has products from shipping profiles whose rate names do not match. Shopify adds the cheapest rate from each profile and shows the total as Shipping.

Can I hide local pickup for some products? Not with shipping profiles. A delivery customization can hide pickup options when a matching product is in the cart.

Does hiding a shipping method change the price of the others? No. Hiding only removes options from the list. Prices come from your rates.