Staging Your Changes

Shadow mode lets you make changes to your shipping rules and test them against real checkout traffic without affecting what customers actually see. Think of it as a staging environment for your shipping configuration.

Note

Shadow mode is available on Pro and Enterprise plans.

How shadow mode works

1. Enter staging mode

   Click “Enter Staging” in the dashboard. This creates a new changeset — a container for all your staged changes.

2. Make changes

   Add, modify, or delete rules, methods, and groups. These changes are staged — they’re saved in the changeset but not applied to your live configuration. Customers still see your existing rates.

3. Watch real traffic

   While you’re in staging mode, every real checkout is evaluated twice: once against your live configuration (which the customer sees) and once against the staged configuration (which only you see). The results are saved as shadow results.

4. Review the shadow dashboard

   See how your staged changes would have affected real checkouts. Compare live rates vs. staged rates for each checkout. See how many rate differences were detected.

5. Promote or discard

   When you’re confident the staged changes are correct, click “Promote” to apply them as your new live configuration. Or click “Discard” to throw them away — your live configuration stays unchanged.

The staging lifecycle

A changeset goes through these stages:

Status	Meaning
Draft	You’re making changes. No shadow results yet.
Testing	Changes are locked. Real traffic is being evaluated against both live and staged configurations.
Promoted	Changes have been applied to the live configuration.
Discarded	Changes were thrown away.

You can only have one active changeset at a time. Promote or discard the current one before starting a new staging session.

What gets staged

When you make changes in staging mode, the following operations are tracked:

• Create, update, or delete rules
• Create, update, or delete shipping methods
• Create, update, or delete product groups
• Create, update, or delete blended rates

Each individual operation is stored in the changeset. When you promote, they’re all applied to the database in a single transaction.

Best practices

1. Make focused changes. Keep changesets small and targeted. A changeset with 2-3 related changes is easier to evaluate than one with 20 unrelated changes.

2. Wait for enough traffic. The shadow dashboard is most useful when you have a statistically meaningful number of checkouts. For a typical store, 50-100 checkouts gives a good picture.

3. Check the coverage metric. The dashboard shows how many unique zone/group combinations have been tested. Low coverage means some scenarios haven’t been seen yet.

4. Use Test Rates too. Shadow mode tests against real traffic, but you can also use the Test Rates panel to simulate specific edge cases that real traffic might not cover.