How and Why to Offer Free Shipping

Businesses today need to remain flexible and innovative to stay ahead of the rest. At Parcll Delivery, we are aware of the struggles of abandoned shopping carts, offering deals that don’t break the bank, and businesses trying to stay afloat.

 

With this, we also see the question “why to offer free shipping” a lot. Many businesses think that they have to absorb the cost or that it can’t add value to their business, but we can tell you that free shipping can solve many of the online shopping problems companies see.

We want to show you why offering free shipping can add dollars to your business instead of taking them away!

 

Related - 5 Good E-Commerce Strategies To Reach a Wider Customer Base

 

You Don’t Have To Lose Money

 

Most companies think that if they offer free shipping, they have to take on the cost to ensure items are delivered promptly. This isn’t the case at all!

 

Most businesses that offer free shipping distribute the cost to their business across their other products. Redistributing costs saves them money on the shipping costs and allows them to provide an incredible delivery benefit.

 

This strategy is a way businesses ensure their wallet doesn’t drain as they try to promote their products. The other option is to offer cross-selling opportunities to customers. 

 

Cross-selling is the practice of offering products that are complementary to those the customer has already selected. The goal is to enhance the customer’s purchase, providing them with more excellent value while increasing the business’s bottom line. It’s an excellent way of ensuring your customers return because they will be impressed by the level of service. Note that attempting to cross-sell unrelated items can negatively affect customer experience, which will decrease recurring customers and future sales. Cross-selling also has advantages when it comes to shipping costs.  

Cross-selling allows you to ship more items for a similar shipping cost. The more things your business can cross-sell, the more you’ll save on offering free shipping. You can calculate when shipping is the most efficient and set up some sales goals.

 

When you have this goal to reach on orders, it creates an environment for innovation and production.

 

Offering free shipping gets much easier when the service that’s delivering your packages is economical! Parcll is the company for your business to expand globally, save money, and offer a quickly delivered product!

 

 

 

Incentive For Customers To Buy From You

The main reason that people offer free shipping is that customers view it as a considerable value. They will buy more because they are saving forty, fifty, or more dollars on shipping!

 

Providing free shipping allows your business to benefit because they are already buying from your shop, so they’ll order more to compensate for the money they were saving before. The customer adds more items, your cost also goes down for shipping because shipping is more efficient with more product.

 

Adding free shipping as an incentive will also provide you marketing opportunities. You can advertise that your shop gives free shipping on all orders! Anyone who is money savvy will see this as an opportunity to save.

 

Free shipping is such a powerful loyalty incentive that many people pay extra for subscription services to access the benefit. Amazon Prime is a crucial example. By providing free shipping, you can begin to build the same kind of loyalty for your own business, creating opportunities for returning customers, recurring orders, and larger orders. Once there is savings potential, people will flock to your website above all others to optimize their shopping.

 

Related - Hacks For Saving On Shipping Costs

 

Reduce Abandoned Shopping Carts

 

Perhaps the most significant hidden money maker is reducing abandoned shopping carts. Once people reach the end of their shopping journey, they look at one final cost. That cost is shipping, and if it is too high, the customer will walk away from all those precious goods they spent time finding. This fact can result in vast numbers of lost sales. If you offer free shipping, the sales you keep will help mitigate the shipping costs.

 

When a company offers free shipping, this reduces the chance that a customer will leave right before they swipe their credit card. An average of 69% of shoppers abandoned online shopping carts and left, taking up space on a website. Abandoned carts represent cost not only in memory space but lost potential customers.

 

Some businesses say that if they could get more people to press that final purchase button, their company could double in size! Free shipping is one amazingly effective way to reduce abandoned shopping carts. With all of the strategies to reduce shipping costs, it is simple and easy to implement.

 

Speaking of simple and easy implementation, Parcll provides your business with the ability to break into the worldwide shipping market! Parcll wants to remove the hassle of going global and makes it quick with integrations into Shopify and a host of other options.

Use Free Shipping As A Benefit Breakpoint

 

We have all seen this strategy at the supermarket. If the produce is about to go bad, the grocery store will offer you buy one get one half off. Most people will then get twice what they intended, and they feel they got the best deal of the week. You can make this simple adjustment with free shipping as well. When they save on shipping, customers are much more likely to purchase more products.

 

That person will go home and tell their friends, who will rush over to make sure they are in on the savings as well! Word of mouth advertising is one of the most effective strategies out there for gaining more customers. Because people already trust their friends, there is a lower barrier to convincing them to spend their money with you. Free shipping is an excellent talking point for customers when discussing with their acquaintances about great companies to patronize.

 

Cross-selling is a massive benefit to the business, and an excellent way to encourage users to buy more is to offer free shipping if they meet a certain threshold in their shopping cart. Cross-selling can be as easy as offering free shipping if they have two or more items, or you can provide free shipping once they reach a specific money breakpoint. This strategy creates an additional incentive for customers to purchase more items. If shipping is free after a specific price point, customers are more likely to fill out their shopping carts before checking out. 

 

Utilizing a breakpoint combined with your free shipping offer is an excellent choice for budget-conscious businesses who feel unready to offer free shipping across the board. It combines the potential loyalty, cross-selling opportunities, purchase incentive, and abandoned shopping cart prevention with the opportunity to reduce costs by ensuring specific sales goals are met before free shipping becomes active.  

The flexibility of free shipping keeps increasing, and this is just one small way to push your product while offering your customers a huge benefit!

 

 

 

Go International With Your Free Shipping and Parcll

 

Parcll wanted to give businesses a straightforward way to expand their online business and break into Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and more! Parcll is part of a global logistics solutions company that provides more than one million international deliveries each day. Shipping is what we do, so we know we’re offering the best.

 

Free shipping is a valuable tool in a business’s toolbelt. It can entice customers to buy more and even push them to purchase otherwise abandoned items in their shopping cart. It also establishes customer loyalty, new marketing opportunities and encourages word of mouth advertising.

 

We encourage all businesses to offer some kind of free shipping benefit to their customers because we know how fast the dollars can add up when people begin buying to save.

 

How to Establish Free Shipping for Your e-Commerce Business

 

 

Now that we’ve discussed the numerous advantages of offering free shipping for your e-commerce business, it’s a good idea to cover the logistics of establishing it as a practice. This effort includes creating a relationship with a shipping provider, selecting the services they will offer, and integrating it with your purchasing system. While this may sound complicated, depending on the provider you use, it can be a straightforward, streamlined process. 

 

The first step is to select the best shipping provider for your business. There are several considerations for making this choice. First and foremost, discover what services the provider offers. Simple domestic shipping should be a given, but what is their track record with international shipping? Do they offer fulfillment services? This option is potentially vital for your business, as it will drastically increase the efficiency of your e-commerce business. Learn about the price structure as well. Do prices remain the same no matter what, or do they offer benefits for high shipping volumes or exclusivity? Determine whether they’re able to ship your entire range of products. Some shippers have limits on size and material, so it’s essential to ensure that the shipping provider offers all of the services your company requires. 

 

Once you have defined the best shipping provider for your business, it’s time to get them integrated into your business processes. Some companies make this more straightforward than others. There may be shipping agreements to negotiate. It may be necessary to find a way for your website to communicate with your shipping provider. Parcll offers plug-in integration for web-based marketplace sellers to make the transition as simple as possible and keep your business moving at a clip. 

 

The final bit of logistics is knowing what happens when a customer makes a purchase. Set shipping prices to zero in your online store. This way, no additional fee goes into the customer’s total. Then, when the customer makes the purchase, you as a business pay the shipping provider directly. This payment can occur automatically or on a case-by-case basis, depending on how you’ve set up your shipping. 

 

How to Establish Free Shipping for Your e-Commerce Business

 

Now that we’ve discussed the numerous advantages of offering free shipping for your e-commerce business, it’s a good idea to cover the logistics of establishing it as a practice. This effort includes creating a relationship with a shipping provider, selecting the services they will offer, and integrating it with your purchasing system. While this may sound complicated, depending on the provider you use, it can be a straightforward, streamlined process. 

 

The first step is to select the best shipping provider for your business. There are several considerations for making this choice. First and foremost, discover what services the provider offers. Simple domestic shipping should be a given, but what is their track record with international shipping? Do they offer fulfillment services? This option is potentially vital for your business, as it will drastically increase the efficiency of your e-commerce business. Learn about the price structure as well. Do prices remain the same no matter what, or do they offer benefits for high shipping volumes or exclusivity? Determine whether they’re able to ship your entire range of products. Some shippers have limits on size and material, so it’s essential to ensure that the shipping provider offers all of the services your company requires. 

 

Once you have defined the best shipping provider for your business, it’s time to get them integrated into your business processes. Some companies make this more straightforward than others. There may be shipping agreements to negotiate. It may be necessary to find a way for your website to communicate with your shipping provider. Parcll offers plug-in integration for web-based marketplace sellers to make the transi