Split Shipping
Let a single order ship to multiple addresses, with its own shipping rate, tax, tracking number, and delivery timeline per shipment.
Split shipping lets one order ship to more than one address. Each shipment carries its own destination, shipping rate, tax, tracking number, and delivery timeline, and every place an order is presented — order details, invoices, notification emails, and the storefront order tracking widget — groups line items by shipment.
This page covers enabling the feature and what changes across the platform once it is on.
Enable Split Shipping
- From your Unified Admin, go to Settings > Shipping Settings > Shipping Methods.
- In the Shipping Defaults card, tick Split shipping.
- Click Save.
See Shipping Methods for the other shipping defaults.
How Orders Are Structured
Every order is now built from shipments rather than a single shipping address, whether or not split shipping is enabled.
- With split shipping off, PrintNow creates one shipment covering the whole order automatically. Nothing about the customer experience changes.
- With split shipping on, the checkout adds an item assignment step where the customer decides which items go where.
Because of this, an order's shipping address, method, rate, and tracking number all live on its shipments rather than on the order itself.
Checkout
Address selection
When the cart maps to a single shipment, the shipping step presents a dropdown of the customer's saved addresses, plus a button to add a new one. This replaced the previous radio-button list.
The option to ship to multiple addresses is hidden when the cart contains only one item, since there is nothing to split.
Item assignment
With split shipping enabled and more than one item in the cart, the customer assigns items to addresses. Items are presented in groups:
| Group | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Your catalog items | Customers can ship them all to one address, or switch to multi-address mode and assign each item individually. |
| Sinalite items | Shown as a vendor fulfillment group with a single Ship to address for the whole group. |
| 4Over items | Shown as a vendor fulfillment group. When there is more than one 4Over item, customers can switch the group between a single address and per-item addresses. |
Rates and totals
Each shipment is rated independently against the carrier, so a customer shipping to two states sees two separate rates and two separate tax calculations. The customer cannot continue until every shipment has a rate selected.
When a vendor's shipping rates cannot be retrieved, checkout now explains the problem and offers a retry rather than continuing silently. Previously a failed rate lookup could pass through unnoticed.
Order Details
On the order detail Products tab, each line item shows the shipment it belongs to along with that shipment's status. See Orders.
Each shipment record carries:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Ship To | The destination address for this shipment. |
| Shipping Method | The carrier service selected for this shipment. |
| Shipping Total | The rate charged for this shipment. |
| Tracking Number | Tracking numbers for this shipment only. |
| Date Shipped | When this shipment left, independent of the other shipments on the order. |
| Provider | The carrier or vendor fulfilling the shipment. |
Invoices
The printed invoice adapts to the order:
- Single shipment — the layout is unchanged. Ship-to address, date shipped, shipping method, and tracking appear in the existing header blocks.
- Multiple shipments — a shipment table replaces those header fields, with one numbered row per shipment showing #, Ship To, Date Shipped, Shipping Method, and Tracking.
Email Notifications
Order notification emails group line items by shipment, so a customer receiving a split order sees which items are travelling together and the tracking number that applies to each group. See Email Notifications.
Order Tracking
Both the customer's order details page and the order tracking widget are shipment-aware.
- When an order has one shipment, tracking displays exactly as before.
- When an order has multiple shipments, each is listed as Shipment 1, Shipment 2, and so on with its short address and shipping method, and the line items belonging to it. Selecting a shipment updates the progress timeline and map to that shipment's journey.
Enterprise API
The Enterprise API exposes shipments as first-class data:
- The order response includes a
shipmentsarray with per-shipment provider, service, shipping total, tax total, tracking numbers, shipped date, and destination address. - Each order item carries a
shipment_indexpointing at the shipment it belongs to. - Shipped and status updates propagate to shipments. Updating the order applies to every shipment on it; updating a single item applies only to the shipment containing that item — which is how you ship one destination independently.
These additions are backward compatible: the existing flat shipping_address, shipping_provider, shipping_service, and shipping_total fields still reflect the primary shipment, so integrations built before split shipping keep working unchanged.
See Orders in the Enterprise API reference.
Associations
Print Store
| Area | Effect |
|---|---|
| Shipping Methods | The Split shipping checkbox in Shipping Defaults turns the feature on for the storefront. |
| Checkout | Adds an item assignment step; rates and tax are calculated per shipment; the address picker is a dropdown. |
| Orders | Line items display their shipment and shipment status. Tracking numbers are recorded per shipment. |
| Email Notifications | Order emails group items by shipment. |
| Partner Apps | 4Over and Sinalite items are always placed in their own vendor fulfillment shipments. |
Related Pages
- Shipping Methods — enable split shipping and configure carrier rates
- Shipping Locations — ship-from addresses
- Orders — per-shipment status on the Products tab
- Email Notifications — templates that group by shipment
- Enterprise API Orders — shipment-level API behavior
- 4Over and Sinalite — vendor fulfillment shipments