Free shipping season is here; it’s that time of year online shoppers are filling their online shopping carts in droves. But they’re also looking for the best deals out there. And boy-oh-boy do they love free shipping (who doesn’t?). But how can you make free shipping work for you without cutting into your profit margin? 

Finding Profit in “Free” 

Before advertising free shipping, you have to find a balance between profitability and incentive. Striking this balance starts and ends with volume requirements. Setting minimum thresholds to drive volume minimums will hedge against your shipping costs. 

Once you’ve established a framework for absorbing the shipping costs, it’s time to test your promotions. Whether you’re focusing on social media, email marketing, or old fashioned organic content marketing, A/B testing your promotions allow you to fine-tune specific minimum requirements to determine what thresholds work best for your market and audience.

(Pro-tip: If your audience is responding well, you may want to adjust for a higher threshold to turn more of a profit. Likewise, you may want to decrease the minimum order value if you aren’t seeing much success.)

Free Shipping, Consumer Psychology & Cart Abandonment

When your audience is ready to checkout, nothing repels them more than shipping costs. The leading cause of cart abandonment, the psychology behind shipping costs stems from sticker shock. 

According to PracticalEcommerce.com, “36% of online shoppers do not make a purchase online unless free shipping is offered… [while] another 42% of online shoppers said that free shipping was “somewhat important,” and actively sought out free shipping deals.” And this is only amplified during the holiday shopping season. 

Pushing free shipping not only alleviates cart abandonment, but it also allows you to attract more customers. But this also presents the added burden of absorbing costs. This is where third-party shipping providers can help. Enlisting third-party shipping providers will provide you the additional resources to further cut your costs. 

Not only do third party shipping providers find you the best rates, they also automate the process for a seamless experience. So third party shipping options not only make your business more affordable for your customers, but they also allow you to easily offer free shipping. 

All these courier solutions will improve your business’ reputation while ensuring a faster delivery to keep cart abandonment down. Outsourcing your operations to third-party delivery providers, such as ShipTime, will allow you to grease the axle of customer satisfaction thanks to its customer-centric services.

When weighing your shipping strategy options, make sure you’re partnering with the right shipping service. ShipTime lets you enter box dimensions and package weight for an accurate rate quote. Aggregating data to find you the best shipping rates available, the ShipTime search engine finds you the best possible shipping rates. Meanwhile, the ShipTime dashboard speeds your shipping quote with predefined box sizes. It also provides predefined incentive rewards with a “My Pickups” functionality to track scheduled pickups and times.  

Learn more here.