What’s New at Shopify?

Shipping line weights

The shipping line(s) shown in the financial summary card on the order details page has always included the total shipping line weight, but this value was potentially incorrect for the following reasons:
* The total shipping weight would be increased if additional items were added to the order, but it did not decrease when items were removed from an order
* For orders with multiple shipping lines, the same shipping weight value was repeated on each shipping line
* The shipping weight consists of the total weight of all items + the weight of packaging, but the package weight was based on the store’s default package weight, which may not match the actual package that was selected during checkout when calculating the shipping rates
* If the store’s default package weight is changed, this change also impacted the total shipping line weight of all existing orders

We have made changes so that total weight is updated when items are removed from the order, and also now show the total item weight separately from the default package weight.

Tax-inclusive pricing

The financial summary shown on the orders details page has historically misrepresented some of the financial values for orders with tax-inclusive pricing. On these orders, the subtotal and shipping values have always included taxes, despite the fact that those values were also represented again on the taxes row. This meant that the sum of all values in the financial summary exceeded the actual total value of the order.

We had made the decision to modify this behavior to provide an accurate financial summary of the order, by removing taxes from the subtotal and shipping values shown in the card, resulting in a behavior consistent with orders without tax-inclusive pricing.

Unfortunately this led to some unexpected confusion on tax-inclusive orders and proportional shipping taxes amplified the issue. With tax-inclusivity enabled, the shipping taxes are actually deducted from the shipping price that was shown/charged to the buyer, as opposed to charging additional taxes on top of the price shown/charged to the buyer. This meant that the pre-tax value of the shipping fee was less than some merchants expected. See below for a detailed example.

The card has been reverted to include taxes in the subtotal of line items and taxes in shipping costs as applicable.

Example order values:
Order subtotal, pre-taxes: 161.41
Discounts: -1.04
Line item taxes: 5.86
Order subtotal, taxes included: 167.27
Shipping fees, pre-taxes: 24.07
Shipping fees, taxes included: 24.95
Shipping taxes (proportional): 0.88
Total: 191.18

The shop shipping rates are configured as tax-inclusive, which means taxes are computed and removed from the shipping line base price.

With the new changes, the order financial card would display the following:

Subtotal: 161.41
Discounts: -1.04
Shipping: 24.07
Taxes (10%): 6.74
Total: 191.18

The order financial card has been reverted to the previous display.
Subtotal: 167.27
Discounts: -1.04
Shipping: 24.95
Taxes (10% included): 6.74
Total: 191.18