About delivery for Pre-orders and Try Before You Buy (TBYB)

You can use delivery profiles to define shipping rates and delivery destinations for orders with pre-orders and TBYB. This guide explains delivery profiles and their use cases, related webhooks, and limitations.

What's a delivery profile?

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A delivery profile is a set of shipping rates scoped to a set of products or variants that can be shipped from selected locations to zones. You can associate the DeliveryProfile with the SellingPlanGroup object to do the following tasks:

Set free shipping for all orders with pre-orders and TBYB
Restrict shipping to specific countries
Set a flat shipping rate by country for all orders with pre-orders and TBYB

The following diagram shows the relationships between different delivery profile objects in the GraphQL Admin API:

Objects and descriptions
Object	Description
Delivery profile	Shipping settings for a group of product variants. For example, you might have a delivery profile for heavy variants and another for fragile variants.
Profile items	An array of objects where each object includes a product and a list of associated product variants. For information on how to create pre-orders and TBYB and associate them with products and variants, refer to Manage pre-orders and TBYB.
Location groups	A set of locations that ship the product variants to the same delivery zones. For example, you might have a location group for the Americas that ships to Canada and Germany, and another location group for Europe that also ships to Canada and Germany.
Delivery zones	A group of countries where the variants in the delivery profile are shipped to. For example, you might ship products to Canada.
Delivery methods	The static rates or carrier-calculated rates for the delivery zones. For static rates, you can set conditional rates that take effect only if certain conditions are met. For example, you can specify a condition that applies free shipping when a cart's total is greater than or equal to $100. Shipping rates are surfaced at checkout to the customer.
Rates	The fixed or dynamic shipping prices that are displayed at checkout.

Shipping rates displayed at checkout

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Customers can buy a product as a one-time purchase ("buy now, pay now, ship now") or as a pre-order or TBYB when both are offered by the merchant.

One-time purchases and deferred purchases

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When a one-time order and a deferred purchase are in the same delivery profile and the products are coming from the same location, the shipping rate for the one-time purchase and the deferred purchase are calculated together.

If you want to calculate the shipping rate for the deferred purchase separately from the one-time purchase, then you need to do the following tasks:

Use the deliveryProfileCreate mutation to create a separate delivery profile for the pre-orders or TBYB.
Associate the SellingPlanGroup object for the deferred purchase to the delivery profile.

Shipping rates for multiple deferred purchases

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Shipping rates are consolidated if multiple deferred purchases are in the cart and the products share the same billing and delivery policies from the same pre-orders or TBYB.

If a cart only contains deferred purchases, then the customer will pay the shipping cost when the remaining balance amount is charged.

Multiple shipping rates

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Customers can select a shipping rate for products in the cart if more than one shipping rate is available. The shipping rate is applied to all one-time purchases and deferred purchases. For more information, refer to the limitations.

Customers can view the total shipping costs for one-time purchases and the total shipping costs for deferred purchases in the cart.

Webhooks

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There are no webhooks specifically available for your app to receive information about shipping on pre-orders and TBYB. However, if your app needs to react to a shop's delivery profile changes, then you can use the following webhooks.

Webhooks
Webhook topic	Description	Payload
`profiles/create`	Emitted when a delivery profile is first created	{ id, }
`profiles/update`	Emitted when a delivery profile is updated	{ id, }
`profiles/delete`	Emitted when a delivery profile is deleted	{ id, }

Learn about configuring webhooks for your app.

Limitations

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By default, a product will have the same shipping rate whether it's bought as a one-time purchase or with pre-orders and TBYB.
Pickup and local delivery methods aren't supported for pre-orders and TBYB. The delivery methods also don't support one-time purchases if the cart contains a product with a pre-order and TBYB.
Shipping rates that are specific to a pre-orders or TBYB don't display in the Shipping and delivery settings in the Shopify admin. You need to configure shipping rates for pre-orders and TBYB in your app.
If the rate is inherited from your delivery profile, then the rate name is Shipping. If you define a pre-orders and TBYB-specific rate using the API, then the defined name is used.

Next steps

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Learn how to manage delivery profiles.