Free shipping may make a huge difference for your business if done correctly. You’ll need to establish a free shipping policy that works for your company while also ensuring that you recoup the costs of shipping on most purchases.
When it comes to creating a free shipping policy for your company, follow these straightforward methods:
- Calculate how much you’ll need to sell in order to recoup the shipping costs. To see whether you can make up the money you lose by covering the shipping cost yourself, spend some time crunching the numbers. This will aid you in determining whether free delivery is available for all purchases or if there are any additional requirements such as a minimal purchase
- Determine a minimum order quantity. If you do the math and find that free shipping on all purchases is costing you too much money, think about setting a minimal expenditure requirement. Requiring clients to spend a predetermined amount of money before being eligible for free delivery may increase your profit margin on those sales while also ensuring greater and more consistent profitability.
- Use free shipping as an incentive in short-term marketing initiatives. Seasonal sales and new product launches are fantastic opportunities to increase revenues by offering free delivery as a bonus.
- Offering free delivery on certain items might be beneficial. The profit margins for different products will vary depending on your business’s variety of goods. You may choose to provide free shipping only on items where the profit margins are comparable, or you may opt to offer it across all your products.
- Free shipping can be offered as a perk for membership, subscriptions, and loyalty programs. Membership and subscription businesses are an excellent method to get repeat business, but you need to provide your consumers with benefits – such as free delivery.
- Offer free delivery on all returned purchases. Offering it for returns is still a step in the right direction, whether or not you can provide free shipping on all of your orders. It gives your consumers piece of mind knowing that if they are dissatisfied with the product, they won’t have to pay anything to return it.
- Make free shipping a loss leader. A loss leader is a product sold at a loss to entice customers. However, it may also be used to describe free shipping. For example, if you ran an e-commerce site that was subscription-based, you might notice that offering free delivery on the first purchase improves conversions. You can also make up the shipping cost since customers with a higher average lifetime value typically have more to spend.
Any of these free shipping options might work for your company, but you’ll have to figure out which one is best for you. Here are some numbers from businesses that have effectively implemented a free shipping policy:
- According to a study published by CNBC, offering free returns shipping (a policy offered by Zappos) increased sales by 357 percent.
- The average computer user has a false sense of security, since they believe that because their PC is so sophisticated and fast, it can never crash or need to be restarted. However, in the case of an emergency situation (i.e., when your PC just doesn’t seem to want to start up), you must always remember that if the program
- According to a study from Marketing Land, 9 out of 10 customers were more likely to do their shopping online if shipping was free. About 30% of those responded that they made weekly purchases.
- Customers find a free shipping bargain with an average savings of $6.99 to be more appealing than a product discount worth $10, according to David Bell of Wharton University of Pennsylvania.
As you can see, there are several methods to take advantage of free delivery in your business plan. It may be difficult to discover the best approach, but it is well worth doing so.