Product Exclusions: Filtering Digital Items & Specific SKUs
Not every product in your Shopify catalog requires shipping protection or rush warehouse fulfillment.
If a customer is buying a digital gift card, an e-book download, or a software license, charging them shipping protection or rush processing creates confusion and friction.
Supercart includes an automated Product Exclusion Engine that dynamically filters items out of fee calculations before rates are displayed.
1. The 4 Ways to Exclude Products
You can exclude items based on any combination of four product attributes:
| Exclusion Method | Best Used For | Example |
|---|---|---|
| By Product Type | Entire classes of intangible or non-shippable items | Gift Cards, Digital Downloads, Services, Warranty |
| By Product Handle | Specific promotional items, free gifts, or test products | digital-gift-card, holiday-catalog-sample |
| By Vendor | Third-party drop-shipped brands or print-on-demand partners | Printful, Spocket, Dropship Partner LLC |
| By SKU | Specific individual product variants or bundles | DIGITAL-001, GIFT-50-USD |
2. How the Subtotal Calculation Works
When a customer adds both physical products and excluded products to their cart, Supercart performs real-time subtotal math:
Eligible Cart Total = Total Cart Value - (Sum of Final Line Prices of Excluded Products)
Concrete Example:
- Product A (Physical Leather Jacket):
$250.00 - Product B (Digital Gift Card - Excluded):
$50.00 - Total Cart Subtotal:
$300.00 - Supercart Eligible Calculation:
$300.00 - $50.00 = $250.00 - Result: If your protection fee is set to 2%, Supercart calculates 2% of $250.00 ($5.00), rather than 2% of $300.00. The customer is charged fairly only on merchandise that physically travels in the mail.
3. The Automatic Hide Safeguard
What happens if a shopper’s cart contains only excluded products?
[!IMPORTANT] Zero Friction Safeguard: If all items currently in the cart match your exclusion criteria (for example, the customer is purchasing only a $100 digital gift card), Supercart automatically hides the extra service widget entirely.
The shopper will never see a shipping protection or rush processing toggle on an order that does not ship physically.
As soon as a physical, non-excluded product is added to the cart, the widget smoothly animates back into view.