Doing a free plus shipping offer is done differently compared to all other types of offers. You need to have a different set up for shipping – and it must be done correctly. If you fail to do so, you may end up losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Let’s discuss how you can set up a free plus shipping offer in Shopify. In this article you’ll learn…

✅ What free plus shipping is and how it works

✅ Why it works

✅ Why you need to set up a weight-based shipping

✅ How you can set up a weight-based shipping

Let’s begin.

What Is Free Plus Shipping?

The free plus shipping model is a business strategy used in many ecommerce stores. How it works is you simply sell your products for $0.00 and only charge your customers for the shipping fee. This fee is basically your price.

Say you have a product that you want to sell at $10. Instead of pricing the product itself, you price the shipping. In other words, your price remains the same, but the way you sell it is different.

Most, if not all the time, what’s sold here are products that you’d sell less than $20. Free plus shipping works really well for these product prices. If the price is more than that, it’ll be harder for you to sell because it isn’t the nature of free plus shipping.

If it’s less, say around $9.95, then people would want to buy it more. Why? Because it seems more believable. But why do most people buy with a free plus shipping offer?

Let’s find out.

Why Free Plus Shipping Works

There are a lot of questions about free plus shipping going around. One of them is: “Does free plus shipping still work?”

The simple answer is YES.

A lot of people prefer having a free plus shipping offer instead of a real offer because of 1 reason only (you’ll know it in a bit). Plus, it can also be used with stronger “angles or hooks” (e.g. urgency) when marketing the product, making it very attractive. Not only that, the word “FREE” is always present in your copy.

So why does this matter?

People like having something for FREE – even if it’s just a candy or even if they still have to pay something to get it. This is the reason why waiters who give free candies get tipped more often than those who don’t. (law of reciprocity)

So what’s with the word free? How does it make free plus shipping work?

People love to have something for free even if it doesn’t make any economic sense. When they’re given a choice between you or your competitor, they always choose the one who offers the smallest price, or the “free” one (yours hopefully) and again, for 1 reason only…

Human psychology.

“We gravitate towards the free choice, regardless of its intrinsic value.” Transactions have ups and downs – whatever it is. Even if it’s a win-win situation (this is just a mindset thing). So what people forget, when they get something for free, are the downsides.

The word FREE gives people an emotional charge that they perceive the offer being more valuable than it really is. This is why free plus shipping works.

Now, while free plus shipping is a tactic of its own, there are still a few things you can do Want to know more about the free plus shipping tactics? Click here to learn more! 

Why You Need To Set Up A Weight-Based Shipping

What you want is for the price to increase based on the quantity of orders you have. When you’re doing a free plus shipping offer in Shopify, you have to set up your shipping rates right, or else people can add how many items they like (100+) to the cart and will only get charged once for shipping. ONCE!

Say your shipping price is $10, and your customer buys your product 100 times – just because they can. Can you imagine losing $990 just because you failed to set up the weight-based shipping right? That would be a huge pain to deal with. Not your best interest, is it?

So let’s talk about that.

How To Set Up A Weight-Based Shipping In Shopify

Okay so the the solution to the problem above is by setting your free plus shipping items by weight – and sometimes, it doesn’t have to be the true weight. You only do this, so you can set the product price to increase by the number of orders you receive.

Here’s what you gotta do…

1. Go to Shopify admin.
2. Click settings at the bottom left.
3. Click shipping.
4. Go to the Zones and Rates section.

This part here is for your products that are NOT free plus shipping offers.

5. Click add shipping zone.
6. Write the zone name.
7. Add country (let’s assume you’re selling in the US)
8. Ignore the price-based rates and calculated rates.
9. Focus on the weight-based rates.
10. Click add rate
11. Name your rate (e.g. FREE Shipping)
12. On the range section, write the minimum weight as 0, and the maximum rate 0.99.
13. Click the free shipping rate.
14. Click Done.

Not this part here is for your free plus shipping offer.

15. Click add shipping zone.
16. Write the zone name (e.g. Free PLUS Shipping)
17. On the range section, write the minimum weight as 1, and the maximum rate 1.99.
18. Don’t click the free shipping rate
19. Write your rate amount (how much you want the shipping to cost for 1 product)
20. Click Done.

Now repeat #15-#20 a few times but always increase the minimum weight and maximum rate by 1.

For the rate amount, what you can do is double it (for the 2^nd time and triple the 3^rd time) or have a discount per quantity so they’re more likely to buy more. This is literally like a built-in upsell – so do what you can with it.

Now repeat. You can also do these for other countries, if you’re targeting them too, but always keep in mind how much it costs to deliver it in certain countries and how long the products can be delivered there.

We Aren’t Done Yet

After setting up the weight-based method, you still have to do something else – setting up the weights on your products.

Say what you’re selling is a mug.

1. Go to your products section.
2. Click the box (on the left side of the product)
3. Then go to “edit products”.
4. Click “add fields”.
5. Click “weight”.
6. Now, in the weight column, you’ll see boxes filled with 0.
7. If it’s a free plus shipping product, you want to change the weight to 1.
8. If it’s just a free shipping product, don’t change it.
9. For the free plus shipping product, change the product price to 0.
10. Click Save.

And that’s finally it.

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