There is a fine line between a smash hit and a huge mistake when it comes to promotions. You want free shipping promotion to make your audience happy, but you still want to turn a profit. This is easier said than done.

Free Shipping Thresholds

Striking this balance is more realistic when you set minimum thresholds. For example, require your customers to meet minimum purchasing requirements. This way you can ensure the profit margin absorbs the free shipping costs. And A/B testing these promotions let you fine-tune any minimums to determine the best thresholds. If they’re 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.

“58% of shoppers will add items to their cart to qualify for free shipping if they reach a certain dollar amount,” according to A Better Lemonade Stand. “Shipping [costs come with] doing business online… This is partly why this “extra fee” is one that customers despise. Additionally, unexpected fees at the time of checkout scare off more than half of potential customers…”

Curbing Cart Abandonment

The leading cause of cart abandonment is because “shipping and handling costs were too high,” according to Shopify. And the psychology behind this cart abandonment stems from sticker shock.

When a potential customer sees the price of your product, that’s what they decided to spend at that point. But when they’re ready to checkout, the added shipping costs encourage cart abandonment. So advertising free shipping alleviates this. Then the only additional price is the sales tax… which they know is inevitable.

So not only do you attract more customers, but you also drive down your cart abandonment— among the many frustrations of the small business owner.

Maintaining a minimum threshold for free shipping will improve your business and ultimately keep cart abandonment down. Outsourcing your operations to third-party delivery providers, such as ShipTime, will allow you to generate more customer satisfaction thanks to its wealth of customer-centric services.

In addition to crawling the best possible prices, ShipTime allows you to access the information most important to your business. And all on one screen. The ShipTime dashboard, for example, speeds your shipping quote with pre-defined box sizes. The solution also provides predefined incentive rewards and the “My Pickups” functionality, allowing customers to see scheduled pickups and times.

They cover all your bases when it comes to efficient tracking and delivery. Organizations such as ShipTime.com work in conjunction with express courier providers– of your choice– and special loyalty programs. They take care of all the details with turn-key and fully supported programs, offer a refer-a-friend program, ShipCash, and the customer representative chat feature.

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