Shipping Tests - Shipping Rates Mechanism

A deep dive into the mechanism behind ABConvert's shipping rates to understand how shipping options will appear after launching a shipping test.

Introduction

Many users wonder how shipping options will appear after launching a shipping test. To clear up any confusion, this article provides a deep dive into the mechanism behind ABConvert's shipping rates.

How Carrier Rates Work

When you enable our carrier rate (now handled automatically within the app), a carrier rate will be added to your Default Shipping Profile. However, for other shipping profiles, you’ll need to manually add the rate.

ABConvert’s carrier rate dynamically returns shipping rates based on your A/B testing conditions, making it possible to test different shipping prices for different customer segments.

Example: A/B Testing Shipping Rates

Suppose you set up a shipping test with the following conditions:

• Control Group: Standard Shipping - $5

• Variant A Group: Standard Shipping - $10

At checkout, customers will see different shipping rates based on their assigned group:

- Control

- Variant A

The underlying process works as follows:

Why should the rate be deleted?

When setting up a shipping test, users may come across this section and wonder why it appears.

The reason for this is that Shopify automatically returns the lowest rate if multiple shipping rates share the same name.

Let's go over the flow again with an example:

If you want shipping rates to dynamically return different values for different users, deleting the rate is necessary. This ensures that the system does not default to the lowest available rate but instead applies the correct rate based on the test conditions.

Then the flow becomes:

After deleting the original rate, you can achieve the scenario you want.

Conclusion

This article explains how the carrier rate mechanism works, helping you apply the logic to set up your shipping test correctly.