How to Set Up Free Shipping on Shopify

The most important reason to offer free shipping to customers is to ensure they complete their order and buy your products. However, it will also build customer loyalty, encouraging customers to return and shop with you again.

It’s worth seeing if your competitors and other brands in your niche are offering free shipping too – and even if they aren’t, you’ll have a competitive edge!

Unsure of the different ways you can offer free shipping? Here are three of the most common tactics – as well as their pros and cons:

1. Free shipping codes (as a default): If you want free shipping to be your default, you can set it as your rate for all orders. This makes managing shipping rates much easier and is very popular amongst Shopify websites. Free shipping is the best way to convince people to shop and it builds trust and loyalty. However, you need to make sure you can afford to offer it and still make a profit!

2. Cost-based rates: This means adding a price-based condition to your free shipping rate – i.e customers have to spend over $100 to get free shipping. It’s a common offering on a lot of ecommerce sites and is perfect if you want free shipping to be available on orders over a certain value. The biggest pro of this is it can encourage people to buy more items to qualify for free shipping!

3. Weight-based rates: Want to add free shipping for orders that are over a certain weight? Add a weight-based condition, for example free shipping for orders over 30kg. If you opt for weight-based shipping, browsers will only be shown the shipping rate that is correct for the weight of their order – making it great for websites selling a variety of products in different weights.

Now for the important part; setting up the free shipping itself.

If you’re setting free shipping rates for orders over a certain value or fixed amount, you’ll want to add it to your general shipping rates profile. By creating a profile, you can add shipping zones and shipping rates to make things super clear for customers.

Here are the steps to follow for each type of free shipping – the good news is they are all pretty similar and very straightforward!

Free shipping codes (as a default)

1. Go to Shopify admin and then ‘Settings’ and ‘Shipping and delivery’.
2. Next, click ‘Manage rates’ (next to ‘General shipping rates’).

• • For each shipping zone, click ‘Add rate’ and enter the name.
  • Make sure that the value of the Price field is 0.
  • Click ‘Done.’

3. Finally, don’t forget to click ‘Save’!

Cost-based rates

1. Go to Shopify admin and then ‘Settings’ and ‘Shipping and delivery’.
2. Next, click ‘Manage rates’ (next to the shopping profile where you want to add the rate) and then there are just a few steps to go!

• • Click ‘Add rate’ and enter the name.
  • Make sure that the value of the Price field is 0.
  • Click ‘Add conditions’ and select ‘Based on order price’.
  • Enter a minimum price and click ‘Done.’

3. Finally, don’t forget to click ‘Save’!

Weight-based rates

1. Go to Shopify admin and then ‘Settings’ and ‘Shipping and delivery’.
2. Next, click ‘Manage rates’ (next to the shopping profile where you want to add the rate).

• • Click ‘Add rate’ and enter the name.
  • Make sure that the value of the Price field is 0.
  • Click ‘Add conditions’ and select ‘Based on weight’.
  • Enter a minimum weight and click ‘Done.’ 

3. Finally, don’t forget to click ‘Save’!

Offering free shipping is one thing, but to drive sales and traffic even more, it’s a great idea to promote your free shipping offers. This ensures your customers know what you offer in advance and encourages them to start browsing.

There are a number of apps and initiatives on Shopify to do this, including adding a free shipping bar – which is a favorite amongst many ecommerce site owners. Here are the most popular free shipping apps:

1. Privy: Privy collects contacts using pop-up templates, sends product announcements, discount codes, and saves abandoned carts – just to name a few of its features. It makes it easy to set up a free shipping bar to boost average order value and cart conversion rates

2. Free Shipping Bar + Cart Goals: A great choice for promoting free shipping with an announcement bar at the top of your website to lift engagement. You can also create cart goals on what you want to offer users. The best part? It’s easy to set up and doesn’t require coding.

3. Free Shipping Goal Bar: This app will help increase order values by showing free shipping goal bars that update in real time with messages and engaging visuals. It comes with vibrant animated designs to choose from to suit your store.