With the holidays fast approaching, brands on Shopify are working to optimize their websites for the gifting season. Ensuring that site-wide messaging, product pages, and bundling are ready to go for holiday shoppers is paramount to capitalizing on ecommerce’s busiest time of year.
One of the most common needs for online gift buyers is the ability to buy multiple gifts for different recipients. Especially during the holiday season, bulk orders for corporate gifting or large groups is an essential. As users go to checkout, a seamless experience should allow them to send gifts to multiple addresses without having to start a new cart, relieving any friction in increasing their order value. To address this, Domaine is offering multi-ship implementation to our client base as they prepare their storefronts for the holidays.
As a Shopify Partner, we have designed, developed, and integrated applications for merchants of all shapes and sizes. We are the first agency to successfully implement multi-ship for Shopify, which was previously considered a platform limitation. We have now customized and integrated this solution across a variety of brands. Let’s dive into how it works.
Multi-Ship: Domaine’s Solution
This solution gives your customers the ability to send products to multiple addresses from a single order and with a single checkout. Customers can set an address for each individual item in their cart, group items going to a single address, quickly select from saved addresses, select a unique shipping rate per destination, and add a personalized gift message.
Why should you implement multi-ship?
1) Gifting
Gifting has become a year-round activity and customers are looking for new ways to be thoughtful and intentional with their gifts. Multi-ship simplifies the shopping experience around events such as Mother’s Day, where customers may be catering to the various mother figures in their lives.
2) Conversion
This solution decreases the times a customer has to return to the cart and run through the checkout process. With a singular checkout needed to purchase and mail to multiple recipients, customers have a higher chance of converting.
3) Average Order Value
With multi-ship available, customers are incentivized to purchase all of their gifts in one place. They are more likely to increase the number of items in a single order and browse the breadth of products available.
4) Customer Lifetime Value
The intuitive checkout experience combined with the ability to store multiple addresses for future use will drive repeat purchases and foster brand loyalty. It creates flexibility and ease-of-use.
Our Approach
Before building out a custom multi-ship solution, there are important strategic considerations we take into account with a client.
Order Fulfillment
From the customer perspective, there should only be one order number for their purchase. However, from the warehouse fulfillment perspective, each order going to a specific address needs to be treated individually and requires its own order number for tracking. It is crucial to correctly feed this information from Shopify to the ERP system.
Taxes
Sales tax varies by state and by municipality and the items going to each address need to have the correct sales tax applied. These are difficult to set up manually and must be updated alongside changing regulations. It is important to set up an integration within Shopify to automatically calculate the correct tax amount for each order going to a different address
Returns
Returns must also be treated separately for each address. This ensures that returning the items going to one address doesn’t refund the entire multi-ship order. It also supports a proper return process where the correct amount of tax is withheld in the system for each address and the correct amount is refunded.
UX Design
Our typical user flow for multi-ship allows customers to select whether they want to ship to one or multiple addresses via a button from the shopping cart page.
From there, users are directed to a page where each line item has a drop-down menu to select or create a new shipping address. If the product quantity for an item is more than one, users can add multiple shipping addresses.
On the following page, users can then select a shipment option and add a gift message for each order going to a different address.
The user is then taken to the Shopify checkout page. UI customizations are made to the checkout page to group line items by shipment, skip the shipping method, and amend the displayed address to be the billing address.
Limitations
Discount Codes & Gift Cards
Our multi-ship solution can support a variety of discount code types. Because Shopify’s discount code validation functionality cannot be used to its full extent for the multi-ship flow, we have built custom functionality to ensure that a discount code is only used once per customer.
Supported Discounts
- Percentage-based discounts
- Product or collection-specific (ex. 10% off X collection only)
- Order discount (ex. 10% entire whole order)
- Dollar-based discounts (only product or collection-specific
- Quantity-based discounts (ex. buy X, get Y)
- Free shipping
Non-Supported Discounts
- If a user is not logged in, discount codes cannot be used
- Dollar-based discounts on the whole order (ex. $10 off)
The experience does not allow the use of gift card codes for multi-ship orders due to limitations around Shopify Draft Orders. This means that users cannot pay with gift cards and cannot send a gift card through a multi-ship order.
Revenue Reporting
With our approach, revenue for multi-ship orders get duplicated within Shopify Reports since there are two orders representing the same purchase (the ‘parent’ and ‘child’ orders). We solve for this via a filtered view within Shopify Reports to remove the duplication.
Subscriptions
Currently, multi-ship orders are not eligible for subscriptions. The solution is intended for one account owner to ship to multiple addresses and only they can manage the details of the orders. If we introduced subscriptions, the receiver would not be able to control the subscription.
Corporate Gifting & Unique Address Limit
This solution is for personal use and corporate gifting. It does not offer the ability to place an order by submitting a spreadsheet with names and addresses. Currently, we set a limit of 100 unique addresses per multi-ship order.
Interested in implementing multi-ship on your Shopify storefront in time for the holidays? Feel free to reach out to our team here.
