A shipping profile in Shopify is a group of products with their own shipping rates and shipping zones. Profiles decide what a customer is charged to receive an order, and whether they can order at all.
Without a working profile, customers meet unexpected costs at checkout, or cannot complete the purchase. That is why a shipping profile problem usually looks like a product problem.
How Printumo handles this for you
If you create products in Printumo and sync them to Shopify, you do not need to build shipping profiles by hand.
Printumo creates a profile for each set of rates it needs, and attaches every synced variant to the right one. The rates reflect the size of the print and the facility that will produce it, so a large canvas is charged more than a small paper print, and a print made locally is charged less than one shipped across a border.
All Printumo profiles are named with the prefix "Printumo:". That prefix is how we recognise our own work.
What Printumo never changes
Printumo only ever creates, renames or edits profiles that carry the "Printumo:" prefix.
Your own shipping profiles and your own rates are never touched, never renamed, and never deleted. If a profile of yours happens to share a name with one of ours, we leave it alone rather than resolve the clash.
If you edit the rates on a Printumo profile yourself, those edits are stored separately from our defaults. They are applied again automatically whenever the profile is rebuilt, so your changes survive a resync. To change your rates, see "Editing your Shopify shipping rates".
Shopify's limit of 100 profiles
Shopify allows a maximum of 100 delivery profiles for each store. This is a Shopify limit, not a Printumo one, and it cannot be raised.
A large or long-running catalogue can approach it, especially if your products have been re-routed to different production facilities over time, because each change can leave an unused profile behind.
When the limit is reached, Shopify refuses to create the next profile. The affected products reach your Shopify store but are never published, and Printumo shows you a notification titled "Couldn't create Shopify shipping profile."
If you see that notification, contact us. The unused profiles can be cleared, which frees the space for the products that need it.
When products show as sold out
A missing or broken profile is the most common reason a Shopify product shows as "Sold out" while your stock level looks perfectly normal. Shopify will not sell a variant it cannot quote a delivery rate for.
The quickest thing to try is to re-link your products. Open "Stores", choose your Shopify store, find "Re-link products with Shopify" and click "Re-link Products". This rebuilds your profiles, reattaches your variants and republishes your products.
For the full list of causes and how to tell them apart, read "Why does my product show as sold out?".
How to set up shipping profiles in Shopify manually
If you are not using Printumo for a set of products, here is how to create a profile for them yourself:
Go to your Shopify settings
Log in to Shopify and click "Settings" in the bottom-left corner of your dashboard.
Select "Shipping and delivery".
Create a new shipping profile
Scroll to the "Shipping profiles" section and click "Create profile".
Give your profile a name, such as "Canvas Prints" or "Posters".
Add products to the profile
Select the products that should use this profile.
For example, add all your canvas prints to one profile and your posters to another.
Set shipping zones and rates
Choose where you ship to, for example Europe or North America.
Add rates for each zone. You can charge a flat rate, offer free shipping, or calculate rates by weight or order value.
If a country is one that Shopify splits into provinces or states, make sure the zone lists those provinces. A country added with no provinces makes the whole profile invalid.
Save the profile
Click "Save", and your new profile is ready to use.