A lot of big brands like eBay, Amazon, and Walmart offer free shipping, but it’s a lot harder for the small businesses to cover delivery cost and still make a profit with their online shopping platform. The first way to reduce the financial loss is to integrate premium Magento extensions and attract more consumers to your business and sell more.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of offering free shipping, different ways to implement free shipping offer and what you need to be careful of.

Should You Offer Free Shipping?

According to figures, over 58% of online shoppers claim to add products to their cart only if there’s free shipping available. Here’s how free shipping could help your business.

Compete with brick-and-mortar stores

People usually visit online stores with expectations of buying the same product that they noticed in a local store, but at a cheaper price. However if they find that they have to pay few dollars extra for delivery, they will consider buying from a brick-and-mortar store. You can compete harder with the local stores by offering free shipping.

Increase sales

Shipping cost is the main thing that make people hesitate before buying online. If you find people visiting your store, but not buying anything then you can consider offering fee shipping. This is a guaranteed way to increase the number of potential consumers that decide to buy from your online store.

Increase average order value

Sometimes it becomes difficult to offer free shipping, especially if you sell a lot of low margin items. One way to increase sales is to offer free shipping with a minimum spend, this will encourage people to spend more.

Things to Consider Before Your Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is a big thing, especially for the small retailers. It’s not as simple as changing the price on your website or marketplace listing. It requires a lot of research work into how much shipping cost will be for different items and loot at the margins for them to work out your business will end up making profit.

No doubt free shipping is a great thing, but consumers will be put off if the product will take a long time to arrive - shoppers are usually happy to wait to a week for free delivery. If it takes more than a week, buyers would prefer to purchase from a local store even if it’s more expensive.

Also consider the location of target buyers. If you’re targeting only local consumers or those from your own country, then you might want to restrict international buyers from receiving free shipping. Integrating a Magento module to check Cash on Delivery is also a great way to sell more.

How You Can Afford to Offer Free Shipping?

For the small businesses, it’s quite difficult to offer free shipping while still making profit on each sold product. Here are some ways that you can offer free shipping to help your online store:

Incorporate shipping into the price

Incorporating some of the cost of shipping in product price is one of the best way to make free shipping affordable to your online store. This will still appeal to buyers that are influenced by free shipping, especially if you are selling products on low margins. Make sure your price is still competitive because a lot of buyers will look around for the best price.

Offer free shipping for limited period

You don’t need to offer free shipping throughout the year, but you can use it as a promotional offer during festival season – it will encourage consumers that have been thinking to purchase particular products from your store. Treat it like a special offer and promote it on your homepage to attract more people to add products to cart and complete checkout.

Minimum spend

Another great way to increase sale is to offer free shipping is with a minimum spend. This will increase the average order value and revenue as well. This is a great way of making free shipping affordable to you and shopping more beneficial to the buyers as they have to spend more and probably buy more than one item to meet the criteria to grab free shipping.

Above mentioned are some great ways to offer free shipping while increasing overall sales revenue at your store. If you want to offer free shipping with each product and increase sales with other methods, then consider installing premium Magento extensions at your store and believe me your shoppers would to keep coming back to your Magento store.