Shipping rates not showing at checkout › Royal Mail rates
Shopify checkout diagnosticsRoyal Mail rates not showing at checkout
You ship from the UK and want buyers to see Royal Mail prices at checkout. You installed Click & Drop, or picked Royal Mail as a carrier, and checkout shows your old flat rate, or nothing. Royal Mail can reach a Shopify checkout in several ways, and each one fails for its own reasons. Start by finding out which one you use.
How Royal Mail prices can reach a Shopify checkout
| What it is | Rates at checkout? | |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify's built-in Royal Mail rates | Shopify's own account with Royal Mail. Needs a fulfilment location in the UK | Yes, on all plans. Domestic UK only |
| Click & Drop | Royal Mail's app to import orders and print labels | No. It is a label and order tool |
| A shipping app that returns rates | A third-party app that sends its own prices to checkout | Yes, if your plan includes third-party carrier-calculated shipping |
| Flat or weight-based rates you name “Royal Mail” | Prices you type in yourself | Yes, on all plans. They never change on their own |
One thing is missing from that list: your own Royal Mail account. Shopify's list of carrier accounts you can connect for checkout rates has UPS, USPS, Australia Post, Canada Post and FedEx. Royal Mail is not in it.
Shopify's built-in Royal Mail rates
Shopify's table of carrier-calculated rates lists, for a fulfilment location in the United Kingdom: DPD UK, InPost UK and Royal Mail. Shopify says these use its built-in carrier integrations and are available on all plans. You add them in Settings → Shipping and delivery, in the shipping profile, with the rate type Carrier or app calculated, then choose Royal Mail and tick the services you want.
This is fairly new. In August 2025, Shopify announced that merchants with a fulfilment location in the UK can buy Royal Mail labels directly in Shopify, using standard rates, with access to Royal Mail's domestic services. Community threads from before that, such as one from 2022, say Shopify had no direct Royal Mail integration. Advice from those years may be out of date.
The services Shopify lists
Shopify's “Shipping with Royal Mail” page lists these domestic services: Tracked 24 and Tracked 48, each also with signature, and Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 with Local Collect, to a Post Office branch or Royal Mail Customer Service Point. 1st Class and 2nd Class are not in that list. If that is the service you expected at checkout, set it up as your own flat or weight-based rate.
Local Collect needs more setup: Shopify says you must first set up shipping to a pickup point, and then buyers choose Ship to pickup point as their delivery method.
Domestic only
Shopify says plainly that Royal Mail as a Shopify-supported carrier “ships only domestically within the United Kingdom and doesn't support international destinations.” A zone for Europe or the rest of the world needs another rate: a flat rate, another carrier, or an app.
Great Britain to Northern Ireland
Shopify's Royal Mail page opens with this note: as of 1 May 2025, shipping labels can't be purchased for orders shipped from Great Britain to Northern Ireland using Shopify's carrier accounts, because of the Windsor Framework. Shopify suggests buying the label directly from a carrier, or using a third-party shipping app that supports the Windsor Framework. The same note is on its Evri page. If you sell to Northern Ireland, check what your Northern Ireland buyers see, and give them a rate you can actually fulfil.
The parcel is too big or too heavy
Shopify gives these maximums for Royal Mail domestic shipments through Shopify: 20 kg, 61 cm long, 46 cm wide, 46 cm deep. Those are the limits of Royal Mail's Medium Parcel. Shopify says carriers base their rates on weight, dimensions and destination, and that the rates are estimated with your store's default package unless your products have a packed size. So an order heavier than 20 kg, or a default box larger than that, gets no Royal Mail rate. Royal Mail's own size guide, for UK items:
| Format | Maximum size | Maximum weight |
|---|---|---|
| Letter | 24 × 16.5 cm, 0.5 cm thick | 100 g |
| Large Letter | 35.3 × 25 cm, 2.5 cm thick | 750 g (1 kg for UK Tracked bought online) |
| Small Parcel | 45 × 35 × 16 cm | 2 kg |
| Medium Parcel | 61 × 46 × 46 cm | 20 kg |
For heavier items, the same guide lists Parcelforce parcels, up to 30 kg. Tubes and rolls have their own rule: length plus twice the diameter no more than 104 cm, longest side no more than 90 cm. If you post flat items as Large Letters, remember that a carrier rate is priced from your default package, not from the envelope you have in mind.
Click & Drop does not show rates at checkout
Royal Mail's Click & Drop app describes itself as a way to choose, buy and print postage online: it pulls in your Shopify orders, marks them as despatched, prints labels in a batch, and produces despatch notes and customs forms. Its App Store listing does not mention checkout rates. A Shopify Community reply marked as the solution, from 2021, says the same thing directly: installing Click & Drop “will not display Royal Mail shipping rates at checkout”. That thread also notes that Click & Drop showed up under Settings → Sales channels, not under Apps.
So Click & Drop and checkout rates are separate jobs. You can print labels in Click & Drop and still need rates at checkout from somewhere else: Shopify's built-in Royal Mail rates, an app, or your own flat rates.
A rate app: check your plan first
An app that sends Royal Mail prices to checkout uses third-party carrier-calculated shipping. Shopify's plan table for it: included on Advanced and Plus; on Grow, for an extra monthly fee or included with annual billing; on all other plans, not available. Without it, the app's rates do not appear, whatever you set up in the app.
Some apps say so when you install them. In a 2021 thread, a merchant installing a Royal Mail rate app got this message: “The extension needs a Shopify feature called Carrier Calculated Shipping Rates to be enabled for your store.” Plan names have changed since, but the rule is the same. For everything else that can stop an app's rates (the app's own switch, zones, product weights, app rules), see shipping app rates not showing.
Evri, and backup rates
Two facts from Shopify's help pages surprise UK merchants:
- Evri through Shopify is labels only. Shopify's Evri page says: “The Evri integration supports only label purchases. There are no carrier calculated rates available for checkout.” It also says Evri through Shopify ships only within the UK, and does not deliver to the Channel Islands, PO boxes or British Forces Post Office (BFPO) addresses.
- Backup rates in the UK use Evri. When all carrier or app rates for a shipment fail and no other eligible rate applies, Shopify shows backup rates. Shopify's table of carriers for backup rates lists Evri for the UK, with the most economical service available.
So if you set up Royal Mail rates and a buyer saw an Evri option instead, your Royal Mail rates probably failed for that cart, and the backup took over. A flat rate in the same zone avoids this: Shopify says flat rates are always shown when they are eligible, even when carrier rates work.
The usual suspects
The rate must exist in the shipping profile of each product and in the buyer's zone, the services must be ticked on the option, and products need accurate weights. Carrier rates can also fail when the carrier is down or too slow to answer. The setup checks are detailed here, and timeouts and backup rates here.
A quick checklist
- Which route: Shopify's built-in Royal Mail rates, an app, or Click & Drop (labels only)?
- Built-in rates: a UK fulfilment location, Royal Mail chosen, Tracked services ticked.
- Expected 1st or 2nd Class? Add it as your own rate.
- Orders over 20 kg, or a default box over 61 × 46 × 46 cm, get no Royal Mail rate.
- International zones and Northern Ireland need another rate.
- App rates: a plan with third-party carrier-calculated shipping.
- Seeing Evri at checkout? Your carrier rates probably failed and the backup showed.
- A flat rate for destinations where you cannot afford “no option”.
What our store check covers, honestly
The free store check builds a cart with one unit of one product, as an anonymous buyer, with one address per country — London for the United Kingdom. When a country has no fixed rate, it also asks for live carrier and app rates, the way checkout does, and lists the services that come back, with their prices. If they do not answer within 8 seconds, we report Could not confirm, not a failure.
A single UK address means Northern Ireland, the Highlands and the islands are not tested. When the UK already has a flat or tiered rate, we do not ask for carrier rates there. Shopify limits how often a store's carrier rates can be read, so the result may be a reading from the last few hours, with its age shown. The check never sees your admin, your apps or your Click & Drop account, and it does not test mixed carts, discount codes, logged-in or B2B buyers. Monitoring re-checks every 6 hours and emails you when a country loses its delivery options or a known option, such as Tracked 48, disappears.
Related
Sources, all checked 19 October 2026: Shopify Help Center, “Shipping with Royal Mail”, “Shipping with Evri”, “Setting up shipping zones and rates”, “Third-party carrier-calculated shipping”, “Third-party shipping carrier accounts and availability” and “Backup shipping rates”; Shopify Changelog, “Buy Royal Mail labels directly on Shopify” (26 August 2025). Royal Mail, “Size and weight guide”. Shopify App Store, Click & Drop listing. Shopify Community threads: Click & Drop and checkout rates (2021), a Royal Mail rate app and the plan (2021), carrier-calculated shipping in the UK (2022).