Depending on the couriers you have connected to your Shiptheory account and where you are sending your shipments from and to, you might be asked to provide product commodity information for your shipment products.
Shopify has a limited capacity for supporting product commodity data, but by leveraging Shopify metafields (more information here) you can enable storage of all required commodity information in Shopify and pass it across to Shiptheory to be used in booking shipments.
Note: Shopify does support 6-digit commodity codes and Shiptheory will download these by default if you don't make any of the changes in this guide. If you need to specify longer commodity codes, then please follow the instructions below. Shopify does also accept a country of manufacture but this isn't accessible by Shiptheory so a metafield will need to be created and linked as per the instructions below.
Add Commodity Information to your Shopify store
You will first need to find and install an app to your Shopify store that enables you to add and edit metafields. There are many out there but they all fundamentally do the same thing. Have an explore and find the one that's right for you.
A metafield consists of three parts - a namespace, key and value. The metafield apps allow you to define (create) the metafields, specifying the namespace and key, and then apply the metafields to your Shopify store specifying a value.
In this case, you need to create and apply metafields to your product variants.
For example, let's take Commodity Description:
The key is essentially a label and the namespace is like a group value, so let's go with Namespace: "commodity" and Key: "description". When you add more metafields later you can also use a namespace of "commodity" to group all the metafields together. If your metafield editor allows you to select the type of values you can enter, select text or string (or similar).
Add the metafield to your product variants, enter the value and save. Make a note of the key and namespace you used.
Link Commodity Information in Shiptheory
In your Shopify settings in Shiptheory, click the Advanced Settings in the bottom-left of the screen and scroll down to the Customs Information section.
Enter the namespace and key for each of the metafields created in the previous step and click Save. Your product commodity data will be downloaded into Shiptheory with each new shipment processed.
Should you have any further questions, please get in contact with the Shiptheory support team who will be happy to help!
