Intuitive Shipping

You can use Intuitive Shipping indefinitely, for free, in Setup & Testing Mode, so take as much time as you need to complete your setup. After you finish setting up zones, Scenarios and shipping methods – and any other things you might need, like packages, locations and blended rates, you can easily test Intuitive Shipping without making your setup live to customer.

That means, even when the status is set to ‘On’, customers can’t see shipping rates from Intuitive Shipping until you select a billing plan and activate your free trial.

Test Your Setup

Click on your store name at the far right of the app header, then select Shopify storefront from the drop-down list. This will open your Shopify store in a new browser tab.

Add some products to the cart, then proceed to the checkout page.

Use the name Intuitive as either the customer’s first or last name.

This will allow your Intuitive Shipping rates to appear the way your customers will see them when you activate your account.

Complete the Shipping address form on the checkout page by adding a test address.

You can use a real or fake street address, as long as the postal code or zip code is authentic.

This is normal. Only you can see the rates being calculated by Intuitive Shipping while you’re in Setup & Testing Mode. Your customers cannot see rates from our system and will continue to see rates coming from Shopify – or another third-party rate provider if you’re using one – until your Intuitive Shipping account has been activated.

Enable Carrier-calculated Shipping Rates

When testing new or updated Scenarios, you’ll need to make sure that Shopify’s third-party carrier-calculated shipping rates feature is enabled on your Shopify account. If it isn’t enabled, shipping rates from Intuitive Shipping will not appear at checkout, even in Setup & Testing Mode. And, you’ll see a red banner on the Intuitive Shipping Activity page and certain other pages.

In certain cases, the red banner will not appear even when the carrier-calculated shipping rates feature is not enabled. This sometimes happens if the feature was previously enabled, but has been inadvertently disabled.

To confirm the status of carrier-calculated shipping rates:

Click on your store name at the far right of the app header, then select Shopify admin from the drop-down list. This will open your Shopify admin page in a new browser tab.

Click Settings on the admin sidebar menu in Shopify.

Click Shipping and delivery in the Settings sidebar menu.

Scroll down to the bottom, then click Manage integrations in the Accounts and integrations section. If you are prompted to Enable third-party calculate rates at checkout by upgrading your plan, the feature has not yet been enabled.

Enabling third-party carrier-calculated rates at checkout is a Shopify requirement if you are using any third-party rate calculator, including Intuitive Shipping, even if you’re not planning to connect Intuitive Shipping to a live rate carrier like FedEx, UPS. If you are on the ‘Basic’ or ‘Shopify’ plans, the feature is $20.00 USD per month, and if you change either plan to an annual subscription, Shopify will add the feature at no additional cost – plus, they will discount your Shopify billing plan by 10%.

If you are on the ‘Advanced’ plan or higher, third-party carrier-calculated shipping rates is already included and enabled. No further action is required.

Clear The Shopify Cache

When testing updated Scenarios or shipping methods, you may need to clear the Shopify checkout cache in order to see updated rates.

Let’s say you want to run a new test checkout immediately after making a change to your rate settings in Intuitive Shipping. Before you re-run the test calculation, change the street address slightly.

For example, if you used the street address ‘123 Main St.’, change it to ‘1234 Main St.’

If you need to use the exact same address from an earlier test, you must then alter the cart contents. You can either –

increase or decrease the quantity of an item, or

add or remove a product.

As long as the type or total quantity of items in the cart is different, the cache will be cleared.

Once you’ve finished testing your setup, you’ll need to activate your account to start using Intuitive Shipping for live checkouts with customers.

Scenarios, shipping methods, zones, rate blending and conditions groups all have a ‘Test’ status. If any of these are in ‘Test’ mode, they will only be visible when you use ‘Intuitive’ as either the customer’s first or last name at checkout, even after you activate your account.

Hide Intuitive Shipping From Customers

After selecting a monthly billing plan and activating your account, you can later hide Intuitive Shipping from your customers at any time. This is useful if you want to conduct future testing on your entire setup without having to change the status of each individual Scenario.

That means, you may need to temporarily add a shipping rate to your Shopify settings so your customers can continue to check out while you test Intuitive Shipping. Be sure to remove this rate from Shopify when you’re ready to re-enable Intuitive Shipping. Otherwise, customers will see both.

Click Settings on the sidebar menu, then select General settings from the drop-down list.

In General settings, set the status to Test.

Scroll to the bottom, then click the Save button to save your Status settings.

Follow the steps above in Test Your Setup – including using ‘Intuitive’ as either the customer’s first or last name. This will allow you to bypass the Status setting and see rates from Intuitive Shipping.

When testing is completed, return to General settings and set the status to On. This will allow your customers to resume seeing rates from Intuitive Shipping.

As an alternative to the ‘Test’ status, you can set the status to Off. This will completely disable all Scenarios and shipping methods in Intuitive Shipping. Rates will not be visible to anyone, even when you use ‘Intuitive’ as either the customer’s first or last name.

Billing can only be disabled by deleting the app from your store Apps list.