Shopify is great! It helps you ship your products all across the world for discounted rates. But what happens when someone down the street orders from you? Are they going to pay the extra few bucks to get it shipped? Most e-commerce stores don’t have a physical location so they can’t just come down to your brick and mortar to pick it up. Unless you’re selling high frequency, you probably have the time to have them meet you at your local mall to pick up their product(s). also, if you provide free shipping, this helps save you time and mitigate shipping risks.
Unfortunately, as of writing this article, there is currently no way to have a local pick up option in your Shopify shipping settings without having to pay monthly for an external app. It got me thinking, why is such a simple issue not addressed by Shopify? Maybe it’s to help you scale. Quite frankly, our shop (Ayah) works on low volume and we need to make sure the package gets shipped safely due to the fragile nature of our business (artwork). So it doesn’t make sense to pay so much to ship when I can just arrange a pickup meeting with my customer.
I have figured a worked around method to allow for our customers to have a free shipping option if they live nearby and are willing to make the journey.
The first step is to separate shipping by your home state/province and all the other states/provinces in your country. In our case (Canada), we created two shipping zones, Ontario and Outside Ontario.
Once those zones were created, the next step is to create a price based rate within your home province/state. In our case, we offered an option that clearly indicated that it was Free Local Pickup and in brackets put the name of our meet up location (Toronto Eaton Centre).
The customer will now see this option if their location is within Ontario and can decide if they want to pick up the piece locally. Once they have ordered their desired product, you can reach out to them via email and arrange a pickup time and date.
