Charging the real weight after you have cut and packed it

A butcher, a fishmonger and a cheesemonger all have the same morning. Somebody ordered a joint, a side of salmon or a wedge of something listed at a round weight. The real one came off the scale heavier or lighter, and now the price on the order is wrong.

Before you design anything around that, there is one sentence from Shopify that decides the whole shape of the answer. It is worth reading twice, because most of the advice written on this subject assumes the opposite.

The rule that rules out the obvious workflow

The workflow almost everybody describes is: put a hold on the card at checkout, weigh and pack the goods, then take the real amount. Shopify's own documentation closes that door in one line:

It isn't possible to collect more money than the value that was initially authorized by the customer. If the customer wants to add more items to their cart, then you can edit the order and send an invoice for the difference, or they can place a new order on their own.

That is not a setting, a plan or an app away. The authorisation created at checkout is a ceiling, and nothing on Shopify raises it after the fact. The developer documentation says the same thing from the other side: a capture can take "a partial payment by specifying an amount less than the total order amount." Less. Only ever less.

So for an ordinary online order — authorised at checkout, or already paid — every design that ends in "and then we charge them the difference automatically" ends instead in an invoice the customer has to choose to pay, after you have already cut the meat. (Stored-card arrangements, the kind a subscription or a deposit scheme sets up in advance, are a different mechanism with their own conditions — but nobody sets one up to sell a chicken.)

Already been caught by this once? Describe how your weighing day runs and we will build around it →

Which means the money can only move one way

The workflow that actually holds is the mirror image of the popular one: advertise the joint at the weight you will not exceed, authorise that, then weigh, pack and capture the lower real figure. Shopify allows exactly that — "you can choose to capture the full payment or a partial payment" — and the customer pays for what they actually got.

Three things make that harder than it reads.

You have seven days, and the clock is the real deadline. "Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days for credit card payments." Capture after that and "a 1.75% charge applies to the transaction in addition to standard credit card fees" — and worse, "after the authorization period ends, you might be unable to collect any money for the order." For a weekly cut-and-collect cycle that is comfortable. For anything that waits on a delivery date two weeks out, it is not.

Longer holds are a Shopify Plus feature, and even there they are uneven. Extended authorisation periods are "available only to stores on the Shopify Plus plan that use Shopify Payments", and they do not apply evenly across your customers: Visa, Mastercard and American Express up to 30 days, Discover and JCB up to 10, Diners Club and China Union Pay still 7. So a Plus store with a Diners customer is back on the same week.

The hold lingers on their statement. Shopify warns that an authorisation "might display on the customer's bank statement up to 30 days after the original authorization, even if the payment was captured or the order was canceled." Authorise high and capture low, and some customers will see the high figure in their banking app for weeks and email you about it — a support cost nobody mentions when recommending this workflow.

What Shopify gives you natively

Editing an order is native and free. You can "add or remove products, adjust item quantities, and update shipping fees", and "if additional payment is required, then you can send the customer an updated invoice. If the order total decreases, then you can issue a refund."

Three limits on that, all Shopify's own, and the third one is the one that catches this trade specifically:

• "You can edit unfulfilled items in an order, but you can't remove fulfilled items or adjust their quantity." Weigh before you mark it fulfilled, not after.
• "You can't edit orders that were paid for using Shop Pay Installments."
• "Orders that have local delivery as the delivery method can't be edited." A butcher who delivers within their own town is using local delivery, and the whole edit route is closed to those orders.

Most of your orders go out on local delivery? Describe the round and we will build the part Shopify's order editor cannot reach →

The apps, and the half they do solve

There is one app aimed squarely at this, and it does real work. Filljoy Order Catch Weights — $19 a month for up to 100 order edits, rising through a middle tier to $99 for unlimited; 5.0 stars from 5 reviews; on the App Store since 23 October 2023. Its own description of the job is the right one: "charge difficult to portion items by actual weights instead of over or under charge for an average weight", and it will "Input the exact weights of line items to edit and fulfill paid online orders", with edits "automatically applied to the original Shopify order or draft order".

What it does not do is change the rule above — nothing can. And it carries Shopify's local-delivery exclusion in its own words: it is "unfortunately currently NOT compatible with Shopify Local Delivery orders."

A second, different group of apps prices by weight at the counter, before money moves — Measura: Sell by Weight at $9.99 a month, 5.0 stars from 38 reviews, is the strongest of them. If your sale happens in the shop with the scale in front of you, that is the cheaper and better answer, and this page is not about your problem.

Merchants have been asking this for five years

The clearest statement of the problem is still the original one:

We can easily setup a cost per pound so if a customer purchases 1 pound of chicken and each pound costs $10 the total would be $10. However, the problem is that the chicken doesn't get cut until the order is placed…

— StevoTheo, 24 March 2021

Nobody answered it. Two merchants arrived in that thread over the following three years to ask whether an answer had ever been found, and the last word in it is still:

I have the same issue. Found possible solutions on other platforms, but no solution for Shopify.

— MosheDC, 9 January 2024

A separate thread put a number on what it costs:

We have literally lost $350 in the last 4 weeks because we can not accurately charge to the 1/100th decimal value.

— DaisyOaks, 17 August 2022

That merchant did get an answer, and which half she got is the point: she came back in November 2023 to report an app had solved it on her till, with the online version still in beta. The counter was always the easier half.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

The weighing day is the part we build, and the part you should never do twice. You describe it the way you run it — "when I type in the packed weight, work out the new line price, hold anything that came in over the estimate for me to look at, and let the rest go out at what it actually weighed" — and that is what gets built into your store and kept working.

Two things worth saying plainly, because they are Shopify's shape and not ours. An authorisation cannot be captured for more than it was taken out for, and on an order already paid the extra leaves as an invoice — so no app and no build turns an underestimate into a silent charge. What a build can do is catch the overweight ones before they ship and get the invoice in front of the customer the same hour instead of the following week. And the seven-day clock is real, so the build watches it: an order nearing the end of its authorisation is flagged while the money is still collectable.

Everything else — the price per kilo, the rounding, the flag on anything far off the estimate, the note on the packing slip — is yours to describe, and a person here has it running in your store within 24 hours.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know what your scale should tell your store? Describe it in your own words →