KM Distance Shipping

Your shop needs the Shopify feature "Third-Party Carrier-Calculated Shipping". Advanced and Plus plans include it automatically; on other plans it comes with annual billing or can be requested from Shopify. The app checks this in its setup guide as the first step and tells you right away whether your shop is ready.

The most common cause: your Shopify plan lacks the carrier-calculated shipping feature (see previous question). Second most common: the rate was removed from your shipping profile — in that case the app warns you with a red banner on its start page and walks you to the fix.

A few minutes. A four-step guide walks you through: check plan, set mode and prices, activate carrier, done. The guide keeps monitoring the state afterwards.

No. Rates come through Shopify's checkout API — the app never touches your theme and works with every theme.

Straight-line distance from your origin postal code — deliberately not driving distance. That keeps the calculation fast, independent of external services and privacy-friendly. Postal-code coordinates come from the GeoNames dataset (CC BY 4.0) and are looked up locally inside the app.

Two modes: postal-code zones with a flat price per zone (longest matching prefix wins, catch-all zone supported) or distance tiers — each tier either a flat rate or base price plus price per kilometre, with an optional cap. Prices always in your shop currency.

Yes. Beyond the largest distance tier (or without a matching zone and no catch-all) the app offers no shipping rate — customers outside the area cannot complete the order with this shipping method.

Zone mode: any country with numeric postal codes. Distance mode: Germany plus Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Czechia and Denmark — including cross-border.

No, the app works in kilometres.

No — one origin location per shop (one origin postal code in the settings).

English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. The app detects your shop language automatically, and there is a manual switcher too.

One plan, everything included: "Standard" at $4.90 per 30 days — with a 14-day free trial of the full feature set. Billing runs through your regular Shopify invoice.

No. Distance calculation runs locally inside the app — there are no external API costs and no usage-based billing.

Just uninstall the app — nothing else needed. Billing ends through Shopify Billing under its rules.

Yes. Shopify shows all rates from all sources side by side at checkout — manual rates, other carrier apps and this app. If you want to show only the distance rates, remove other rates in your Shopify shipping settings.

The app is built fail-safe: on any problem — unknown postal code, unsupported country, internal error — it simply offers no rate. Your checkout never breaks; other configured shipping methods remain available.

No. For each calculation the app receives the postal code and country of the delivery address from Shopify, uses both in memory for that one calculation — nothing is stored, cached or logged.

No — with no one. The app uses no external map service; the geo data ships as static files inside the app and is looked up offline.

On two redundant machines at Fly.io in Frankfurt, Germany, including the database. Details are in the app's privacy policy.

The app implements all privacy webhooks required by Shopify. On uninstall, all stored shop data is deleted completely. End-customer data is never stored in the first place.

By email at info@kevin-metzdorf.com — on business days, with a reply usually within one to two business days, in English or German.

Kevin Metzdorf — Shopify developer and consultant with more than seven years of e-commerce experience. The app is built with the same craft client projects get: data model first, then code.