Free shipping is one of the most effective ways to increase sales of any online store. Naturally, customers are attracted to e-commerce websites that offer free shipping on their orders. Here is a complete guide for you on how to do free shipping on Shopify. You can follow this guide and improve the sales of your Shopify store.
If you own an online store, then you might want to consider adding the free shipping option to your site. It is a proven marketing strategy in the e-commerce world. It also has the chance to increase your customer average order value.
Now, you might be wondering if you offer this to your clients, how can you balance the benefits with the added expenses. This requires planning and making sure you incorporate all the costs and still make a profit.
How to do free shipping on Shopify?
While offering free shipping benefits to your clients, you need to make sure that you are not making losses on the shipping expenses. So, you need to create an accurate plan before setting up free shipping on Shopify. Here are a few points you should consider while planning for free shipping.
Check your profit margins:
You should calculate how much profit you make from each sale. By calculating this, you can incorporate the shipping costs and still make a healthy profit with the free shipping benefits.
Calculate your current shipping costs:
Once you’ve checked your profit margins, you can then start looking into current shipping costs. This is the cost the supplier charges you to ship the item and the price you charge your customers. All this will need to be incorporated into your total sales cost to secure a profit.
Calculate your current average order value:
After you work out the cost of free shipping, you should find out your average order value. You can find your current average order value in the Shopify dashboard.
Increase your order value
Generally, customers buy more products when they get free shipping. So, when you offer free shipping, your order value will increase. You should ensure that your free shipping is attracting customers to buy more than one product. This is easily achieved by adding thresholds for the free shipping and upsells on the checkout pages.
Free shipping on all orders
When offering free shipping, you can choose to apply free shipping on all orders. If you make a profit only from the shipping costs, then this might be a bit of a challenge for you. However, you can increase the price of the products to incorporate this. Many Shopify users have implemented this method, and it has generated more sales. You should calculate the shipping and the product price accurately and slightly increase the amount.
Minimum order value to qualify for free shipping
You can consider this point if the price increment is not ideal for you. You can set a minimum order value to be eligible for free shipping. By placing a threshold point, you can encourage your customers to add more products in their cart to get free shipping. Keep in mind that this threshold shouldn’t be too high as it can have a negative effect.
Add free shipping for specific countries
If you sell products in multiple countries, you might want to think about adding free shipping for some of them. However, shipping costs can differ depending on the countries; it’s worth checking the prices before setting this up. Once you’ve decided, you can easily add this in the Shopify shipping dashboard.
Here are just some of the points you should consider before adding free shipping to your store.
How to set up free shipping on Shopify?
Now you know all the benefits this can bring to your store, you might be wondering how you can set this up in Shopify. To do this, you have to set up the shipping zones in the settings tab. Shipping zones are present in categories according to the locations you are going to ship. The price and weight rules are different for different shipping zones.
Here are the steps on how to set up free shipping on Shopify according to the weight of a particular product.
Setting up free shipping according to the price of the order:
You can follow the following steps to set up free shipping for price.
- Open the settings of your Shopify account.
- Click on the Shipping
- Then click on theEdit option under Shipping Zones.
- Now, in the price based ratessection, click on the Add rate
- In the Add price based ratesection, enter the Name, maximum order price, and minimum order price.
- Then check the box next to the free shipping rate.
- Now, click on done.
Now, you have set up free shipping according to the order price. When a customer meets the criteria of the entered settings, he/she will avail of the free shipping offer.
Setting up free shipping according to the weight of the order:
The following steps will guide you through setting up free shipping according to weight.
- In the Shopify admin, go to settings and then shipping
- Under the shipping section, click the Editoption besides the shipping zone.
- Now, in the Weight-based ratessection, click on the Add rate
- In the Add weight-based ratesection, enter the Name of that product, as wells the maximum weight, and minimum weight, after that check the box besides the free shipping rate.
- Then click on done.
So now, if your customer orders an item of a specific weight, they qualify for free shipping.
So there you have it, that’s how to do free shipping on Shopify. This is a proven marketing strategy that will increase your store’s sales. It’s worth testing this and seeing which method works best for your customers.
