Weight Tiers
Weight tiers price a shipping method by how heavy the order is, rather than charging one price for everything.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Carts — the cart itself and its options
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — then View Data on the cart table, and look for the row actions
How they work
Each tier is a maximum weight and a price. An order is priced at the first tier whose maximum it does not exceed. Above the highest tier, there is nothing to charge — so the top tier needs to be high enough to cover any basket somebody can actually build.
Product weights must be right first
Weight sits on the variant, and tiered shipping is only as good as those numbers. A catalogue with missing or guessed weights produces shipping charges that are confidently wrong, and the error is systematic rather than random.
Before enabling tiers, check for variants with no weight.
Set bands where your carrier does
Because that is where your cost changes. Bands invented independently of the carrier’s produce orders that cost you more to ship than you charged, concentrated just above each of the carrier’s own thresholds.
Leave a margin
Packaging weighs something. A basket at the top of a band, boxed, is over it — so either set your bands slightly below the carrier’s or add an allowance to the weights.
Check the top of every band
Build a test basket that lands exactly at each threshold, and one just over it. That is where tier errors live, and it takes ten minutes to check what would otherwise be discovered by an accountant months later.
Weight tiers are per method
Which is right — a courier and a postal service have different weight economics. It also means enabling tiers is a per-method decision, and a method with tiers enabled but none defined is a method with no shipping price.
Consider whether you need them
If everything you sell weighs roughly the same, a flat price is simpler and no less accurate. Tiers are worth the maintenance when weights genuinely vary.
Worked example
A shop sets five tiers matching its courier’s bands, each 200 grams below the carrier’s threshold to allow for packaging, with a top tier well above its largest realistic order. Test baskets at each boundary caught a transposed price between two tiers.
Recommendations
- Fix product weights before enabling tiers.
- Match your carrier’s bands, slightly below.
- Test a basket at each boundary.
- Make the top tier high enough for any real basket.