Shopify market-driven shipping is the biggest change to how a store configures shipping in years, and it arrives with a deprecation attached. As of the July 1, 2026 feature preview, merchant shipping configuration moves out of delivery profiles and into Markets, and the delivery profile APIs that apps have relied on for years are now deprecated. For a studio building headless Shopify Plus storefronts across Southeast Asian markets, this reshapes the exact layer that decides what a customer pays to receive an order.
What changed
Shopify is relocating merchant-owned shipping settings from delivery profiles to Markets, so shipping options now attach to each market a store sells into rather than to one shared global profile. The July 1, 2026 feature preview runs on Admin GraphQL API version 2026-07, and the rollout has a clear timeline: it reaches merchants starting October 1, 2026, with every store expected to be migrated by July 1, 2027. The model is not just a relocation. Inside a single market's shipping option, a merchant can now vary rates by product and by location conditions, which used to require juggling multiple profiles and zones. App-provided rates keep showing alongside merchant rates, and app-created delivery profiles can now target all products rather than only a subset. So the shipping surface gets more capable and more granular at the same time it moves house.
Delivery profiles vs Markets
The difference is the unit of configuration: the old model hung shipping off a delivery profile shared across the store, and the new one hangs it off each Market you sell into. That shift comes with a hard deprecation. The merchant-owned delivery profile operations are deprecated as of July 1, 2026 with an effective date of August 1, 2026: deliveryProfileCreate, deliveryProfileUpdate and deliveryProfileRemove on the write side, plus the deliveryProfile, deliveryProfiles and location-group queries on the read side. The dangerous part is how they fail. Once a merchant adopts market-driven shipping, reads through the old APIs return a stale snapshot of the legacy configuration, and writes succeed without any error while never touching the merchant's live shipping settings. There is no exception to catch. Shopify's guidance is to migrate merchant-shipping work to the Markets APIs, keep app-owned delivery profiles for rates your app controls, and use Contextual Product Feeds where your integration needs product-level context.
Why it matters for premium studios in Asia
For a studio selling across Southeast Asia this is a structural win wrapped in a migration risk, because Markets is finally how cross-border shipping should have been modeled. A brand shipping to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines has genuinely different carriers, cost bases and free-shipping thresholds in each country, and the delivery profile model forced all of that into a structure that was never built around markets. Per-market shipping makes country-specific rate logic a first-class concept instead of a workaround. The risk is the silent write. A headless storefront or an operations app that pushes shipping updates through deliveryProfileUpdate will keep returning success and quietly change nothing the day a merchant flips to market-driven shipping, and that gap only shows up as wrong rates at checkout. This sits squarely in headless and Shopify Plus commerce, and because the failure is invisible to normal error handling, it belongs in the same review and automation pipeline as any other breaking dependency, with a real test that a write actually landed.
What we would change this quarter
Inventory every place your apps or storefront read or write merchant shipping through the delivery profile API, then add detection for whether a store has adopted market-driven shipping before you trust a single write. Grep your apps and integrations for deliveryProfile reads and writes, and treat each one as a migration target rather than assuming it still works. Add a check for market-driven adoption at runtime, and route merchant-shipping changes to the Markets APIs when a store has switched, while keeping app-owned delivery profiles for the rates your app itself provides. The verification that matters is confirming a write took effect, not that it returned success, because under the new model those two things have come apart. Put this on the board for this quarter, not next: the merchant rollout starts October 1, 2026, and the deprecation is already effective August 1, 2026, so a store can move under your integration well before the final deadline. If you are scoping a headless checkout build, model shipping per market from the first commit and skip merchant delivery profiles entirely. The honest framing for clients is that this is a better shipping model and a genuine breaking change at once, and the studios that treat the migration as real engineering will avoid the ones that discover it through a support ticket about missing rates.