Intuitive Shipping

When a customer attempts to check out and there are no available shipping methods, regardless of the reason, Shopify’s default message will appear in a pink warning banner:

‘Your cart has been updated and the items you added can’t be shipped to your address. Remove the items to complete your order.’

An additional message will appear below the pink banner:

‘No shipping rates found for this address.’

These error messages might confuse people who assume you don’t ship to their location, when in fact you do. It simply might be that you have a minimum order threshold that they haven’t met yet, or there could be an over-sized package preventing live-rate calculations from displaying.

If you are concerned that the default error messages will be confusing or misleading to your customers, we recommend creating a custom message with more detail or better context, such as explaining that a shipping method isn’t available, or directing customers to your shipping information page where it describes any shipping restrictions you may have.

This guide explains how to replace the default text in the warning message with something more appropriate for your store.

Create A Custom Error Message

1) Click Online Store on the Shopify admin sidebar.

2) A list of menu items will appear below Online Store. By default, Themes should be highlighted. If it isn’t, click on Themes.

3) In the Themes section, click the Actions button, then select Edit languages from the drop-down list.

4) Click on the Checkout & system tab at the far right.

5) In the Search bar at the top of the screen, type in ‘remove the items to complete your order‘.

6) Click on the field below ‘Shipping method not available’, then replace the default message with your custom message.

7) In the Search bar at the top of the screen, highlight and delete the previous search, then type in ‘No shipping rates found for this address‘.

8) Click on the field below ‘No rates for country notice’, then replace the default message with your custom message.

Alternatively, you can create a blank message so that nothing appears. To do this you must type at least one space with your space bar into the field. This will remove the default text and leave the field blank.

Save Your Settings

1) Click the Save button at the top right of the page to save your custom messages!

Now, when a shipping method isn’t available to your customer at checkout, they’ll see something like this:

or, this:

That means, even if you customize the message to suit your store, the error message will still be displayed whenever a shipping method isn’t available – for any reason. Be sure that your message is still generic enough to cover multiple situations.

For example, if your message indicates that shipping isn’t available because a minimum order threshold hasn’t been met, but the actual reason the shipping method isn’t being displayed is related to the customer’s address, this will cause additional confusion.