Offering Free Shipping to your customers
by Dufa Staff | 31 August 2020
This is a detailed guide to help you with the importance of offering free shipping to your customers and how to go about it.
Importance of offering Free Shipping:
Studies show that Free shipping is enticing to customers and helps customers get over the shipping cost hurdle and lures them to buy more products. Free shipping increase conversion rates and impact the number of items and the total amount that’s added to shopping carts.
However, there are several other reasons that lead customers not to purchase online or abandon carts & shipping cost is just one of them. Even though free shipping has a positive impact on conversion rates and cart additions, there’s a limit to what customers will accept for free.
When to offer Free Shipping:
Free shipping can be an effective marketing strategy that aims to benefit both the customer and the seller. There are many creative ways to generate revenue and keep your customers returning to your store. Here are some of the free delivery campaigns below to increase sales:
- Products over a specific amount: Many shoppers will add these items to their shopping cart to receive something for free, especially delivery
- Buy two or more items: Up-sell through the use of a free shipping campaign
- A pre-determined time period: Offering free shipping during a specific time frame is ideal for increasing sales during slow periods — or offer further incentives during highly-competitive seasons like Diwali, Christmas.
- Select fast running products: Products that you have inventory of, and are fast running are great candidates for free shipping. For one, customers don’t want to lose out & the free shipping makes it irresistible.
What Free shipping entails:
- If you are offering Free Shipping for a product, you need to bear the shipping cost entirely.
- Shipping cost is calculated by our Delivery partner Delhivery Logistics by considering the pickup address, drop address and the weight/dimensions of the parcel.
- Delhivery API, calculates an estimated rate which will be deducted while paying the Seller.
- If there is a weight discrepancy in the actual order at the time of pickup, Delhivery will notify Dufa and the reimbursement or deduction will be taken care by Dufa in the next cycle. Ensure you consider the weight of your products including the package size to avoid extra charges.
- For sellers charging Free shipping & also accepting returns, note that you need to bear both the Shipping Fee and the Return Shipping Fee.
- Please review the carrier’s terms and conditions for more information on how they handle parcels that are lost, damaged, or delayed.
How to set free shipping for a product:
- From the seller App, go to the menu and select Product Listing
- Browse to the product you want to edit and click the edit icon
- Navigate to the Shipping section
- Change the ‘Charged Shipping’ to ‘Free Shipping’ as shown. Click on Submit
- Click on Update on the Product page.
- Repeat steps for all products you’d like to offer free shipping for.
- The Free shipping tag appears on your product in the search pages
How to set free shipping at store level:
- Currently, there is no provision to set free shipping at store level so you need to set it at the product level.
- You can ask Dufa to help you with a bulk update
- It’s a good practice to upload a new banner on your store page in case you are running Free shipping as a promotion or campaign across your store or for certain products.
- You can also update the shop policy to update your offer.
How to Change Free Shipping setting:
- Understand that you can change the shipping setting for the product anytime, but any order received before the change, will take the older setting into consideration.