Can a shopping cart rule remove free shipping from cart?

Question

I have been trying to set up a shopping cart rule to remove free shipping from cart items that fall into a specific category, say "Closeouts" for example. I have tried several ways but they all fail. One example:

If ALL of these conditions are TRUE:

Subtotal equals or greater than 95.00 

If an item is FOUND in the cart with ALL of these conditions true:
    Category does not contain 9, 79 <-- these are the closeout categories

And then set the action to apply free shipping. I have also tried to do the opposite - essentially, removing the subtotal and setting the category to "does contain", then setting action to free shipping -> no. Regardless of what I try it never works. Free shipping is always present when price is above $95 (this is a global free-shipping rule in shipping methods).

Is the global rule always going to override the shopping cart rule? Is there a way to keep this from happening?

Answer 1

If you defined somewhere (not in the cart rules) free shipping, there is no way to change this (I would guess).

But if you defined free shipping via cart rule, you can define a new rule, which is higher prioritized, check if it matches and then just stop processing (Stop further rules processing)

Answer 2

This might help someone: Configure Magento for free shipping on specific category/products.

1) In this scenario we will be offering free shipping to Products in Category "Gift Certificates" having category Id : 10

2) Set up through Promotions -> Shopping Cart Price Rules -> Actions so that the free shipping will automatically apply if the conditions are met.

3) Since our Shopping Cart Rule is not limited to any product attributes, we can either choose “For matching items only” or “For shipment with matching items” in the Shopping Cart Price Rule Actions as Free Shipping option.

4) Now here, if we select “For matching items only”, if there are multiple items in the shopping cart, the free shipping will only apply for the product within the "Gift Certificates" category and other shipment charges on non-"Gift Certificates" items will be calculated separately.

details source: http://www.ankitsharma.info/blog/magento-free-shipping-on-specific-category-product