The first thing to keep in mind is that there are two completely separate and independent aspects to shipping:

OrbitKit passes through shipping costs to you; we don't make money on shipping. This means that you will be charged by weight and distance, exactly the way that shippers charge. The good news is that generally works in your favor - for example, adding a tee to a hoodie does not increase the shipping price.

Not all products, colors, and sizes are available from every printer. OrbitKit's smart routing system tries to minimize the number of separate shipments, but sometimes that will be impossible. If an order requires multiple shipments, you will be charged separately for each.

This is entirely up to you!

The shipping fees charged to your customers are determined by Shipping Profiles at Shopify and Etsy. You can create these profiles yourself. OrbitKit will also create a set of profiles that closely match what we charge you (eg "OrbitKit Apparel", "OrbitKit Mugs").

When OrbitKit publishes or updates a listing, it assigns the listing a shipping profile that you specify in OrbitKit. You can configure a default shipping profile for your venue and override it in specific blueprints.

One popular approach is to create a Free Shipping profile and make sure that you charge a high enough price to absorb the cost. Be careful doing this with international shipping, which may be more expensive.

Shopify supports weight-based shipping profiles. These profiles closely match what OrbitKit charges you. They may not be perfect; some printers charge more or less for shipping. But it should be close enough.

Etsy only supports shipping profiles of the form "$FIRST for first item, $ADD for each additional item". Furthermore, these profiles apply to a single listing - if a customer places an order with items from two different listings, they will pay the $FIRST amount twice. Etsy shipping profiles are very limited.

OrbitKit creates shipping profiles in Etsy that are a rough approximation of the weight-based fees that you will pay. For more details, read this.