Documentation Universal Shipping Limitations
Universal Shipping Limitations
The technology at the heart of Parcelify Universal Shipping is Shopify Functions. While this lends itself to being incredibly fast an reliable, it does come with a few limitations. Here we’ll explain why these limitations exist, how they might impact you, and what to do if you run into them.
If you are a developer or just curious, you can read more about Shopify Functions here: https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/functions
How your rates end up in Shopify
Shopify Functions are small programs that Shopify executes on their servers using data provided by your Parcelify configuration. In the context of Universal Shipping, this data is all of your shipping zones, rates, and prices.
Shopify refers to this data as Metafields. As your Parcelify configuration grows to represent your shipping logic, the size and complexity of this metafield grows as well.
Data Limits
Shopify limits
At the time of writing, the hard limit for metafields is 10000 bytes, or 10 Megabytes. Your entire Parcelify configuration has to fit in this space!
In addition, you can only use up to 100 product tags in your Parcelify configuration. This is the maximum amount of tags Shopify will let us query on a given product.
Important: If you exceed these limits we will send an email to the address associated with your Shopify account and any changes you make in Parcelify will cease to apply until this complexity is reduced. Read more about this in the section Exceeding the limit.
Finally there is a limited amount of processing that can be done by a Shopify function. We refer to this as a ‘CPU’ limit, and it’s no different from running a large application on your computer. This limit depends both on how complex your Parcelify configuration is, as well as how complex your checkouts tend to be.
We monitor checkout function health to see if any queries exceed this CPU limit, contacting you and launching an investigation to see if we can optimize your Parcelify configuration if it does.
Parcelify limits
In order to help merchants avoid hitting Metafield and CPU limits, we’ve implemented some soft restrictions of our own:
- Five shipping zones
- Ten rates within each zone
- Five prices within each rate
- Five tiers within each price
Within your zones, rates, and prices, the following limitations apply:
- Shipping zone product restrictions are limited to 100 characters
- Product restrictions must not exceed 100 characters
- Destination restrictions must not exceed 300 characters
If you are not sure your shipping scenario will fit within these limitations, please reach out to us at support@parcelify.com.
Exceeding the limit
Parcelify will constantly monitor your shipping rate setup as you add and change rates. If you exceed 90% of the maximum metafield size or 100 product tags, you will be informed via the email address associated with your Shopify store.
You may monitor your usage at any time from the Parcelify front page, under the Universal Shipping section:
If you exceed these limits, changes to your Parcelify configuration won’t apply to checkouts until you reduce your shipping complexity. You may do this by disabling rates, simplifying price tiers, or reducing your number of shipping zones. (Likewise, if you have exceeded your product tag count, you may reduce the number of product tags you refer to in your rates.)
Need more advice? Simply reach out to us at support@parcelify.com
Compatibility with other discounts
By default, when multiple discounts apply to a cart, Shopify will automatically select and apply the greatest discount available. Since Universal Shipping works by discounting pre-existing shipping rates to an amount that matches your Parcelify configuration, this can cause problems when multiple discounts are applied.
In order to avoid this, it is important to set all of your other discounts to combine with Parcelify Universal Shipping discount. Here’s how:
- Open up your Shopify admin panel
- Navigate to your Discounts
- Select an existing discount
- Scroll down to ‘Combinations’ and set it to combine with shipping discounts
- Scroll back to the top and save this discount, repeating these steps for any other discounts you use
Conclusion
We are excited for you to try Universal Shipping and believe the majority of merchants will never reach the limits suggested here. Please feel encouraged to forward any questions, issues, feedback, or suggestions to our support team: support@parcelify.com