Shopify Free Shipping — Does Free Shipping Result In More Sales? | TBS #337

For example: If you’re promoting free plus shipping offers on your store, then obviously there’s no way you can also offer free shipping since the shipping and handling fees is the only way you can make money. It’s called free plus shipping for a reason, right? 🙂

So whenever you’re setting up products on your store, you have to start by asking yourself what type of offer you’re going to make.

There’s two main types of crushing offer:

1) Free plus shipping offers
2) Huge discount plus free shipping offers

Only once you’ve decided which type of offer you’re going to promote, you’ll know if you should use free shipping or not. So start with the end in mind and backwards-engineer your entire offer.

As a general rule of thumb, I recommend offering free shipping on most of your products unless it’s a free plus shipping offer.

Also if you aren’t drop shipping but have your own stock and are shipping products yourself, you might have much higher shipping costs, which means it can make sense to charge for shipping. Otherwise you might make a loss and sacrifice your profits.

So let’s get back to the original question.

Does free shipping increase sales?

It certainly does.

Less friction during the checkout process will result in a lower abandon cart rate. And a lower abandon cart rate equals a higher conversion rate. And that essentially means more sales and money.

Unexpected surprises, including shipping fees, are one of the main reasons people abandon the cart and don’t finish the checkout.

So if there’s any way you can offer free shipping, do it.

At the end of the day it’s all about creating a crushing offer. Step into the shoes of your customers and create something irresistible. The less greedy you are, the better your offers will generally convert.