How can I disable/enable taxes or shipping requirements for my digitial products? (Shopify 2 Admin)

Shopify has a few features to help you sell your digital goods alongside your tangible goods.

Since digital products do not require shipping in a traditional sense, you can disable the shipping fees and shipping address requirements for these products. At the same time, many digital products do not require taxes (or perhaps your tangible goods do not require taxes either), though this is something you should check with your local tax authority.

To disable Shipping and Tax requirements:

When creating a new product, scroll down to the area entitled "Taxes & shipping."  You will be presented with these two options:

• Charge taxes
• Require a shipping address

These two options will be enabled by default. To disable one or both option, uncheck the checkboxes. 

Note: if you have made a mistake or wish to enable these options at a later time, you will need to go back and change these settings for every individual variant of your product. This way, if you have a product such as a book that comes in both a hard copy, and a digital form, you can adjust one variant and not the other.
 

To enable Shipping and Tax requirements:

To enable Shipping and Taxes for a product, you will need to edit the product variant.

First, log in to your shop admin and click on the Product tab. Click on the product you want to edit. Scroll down to the area entitled "Inventory & variants." Click the edit button to the far right beside the specific product variant, like so:

This will open up a new panel where you can edit the Tax and Shipping details for your product.       

To enable shipping requirements, you must give your product a weight. If your product originally did not require a Shipping address, and you are enabling it for the first time, your product will probably not have a weight associated with it.

Enter the weight of your product in the indicated text box (see image below).

Then check the checkbox next to "Require a shipping address."

To enable tax requirements, check the checkbox next to "Charge taxes."

Remember to click Save changes to save your changes.

Advanced: CSV product imports with Shipping required and Taxable variants

If you need to edit the settings for a very large number of products, you may want to perform a 'bulk update'. For this, export the products that need to be updated as .csv file in your admin, then edit the values that appear in these columns:

• Variant Requires Shipping

• Variant Taxable

• Variant Grams

'Variant Requires Shipping' must be set to true or left blank if the variant is a tangible good, and set to false otherwise. 'Variant Taxable' must be set to true or left blank if the variant is taxable, and set to false otherwise. If 'Variant Requires Shipping' is set to true or left blank, you can enter a non-zero value under 'Variant Grams'. If 'Variant Requires Shipping' is set to false, leave the 'Variant Grams' field blank or set it to 0.

When you are done editing your .csv file, re-import it to your shop using the option 'overwriting existing products'.

Related Articles: Bulk Importing Products (CSV)