In the last 6 months we've released the ability to create discount codes for specific Customer Groups and individual Products and Collections, and now we're announcing a new type of discount code: Free Shipping.
Free shipping discount codes will allow your customers to get certain shipping rates for free. You also put a cap on the price of the shipping rate so that you know exactly how much offering your customers free shipping will cost your business.
To create a Free Shipping discount code, go to your promotions tab and create a new discount code.
Under the heading "Coupon Type" select "Free Shipping" from the options and specify the maximum cost of the shipping rate this discount covers. So if you enter "$30" any shipping rates under $30 will be free, but shipping rates higher than $30 will be regular price. You can also choose what country the discount code applies to.
Create your new discount code and you're ready to go. When customers apply the discount code the word "Free" will appear next to any free shipping rates.
Free shipping can be a great tool to increasing sales, especially during the holiday season. A little while back, we worked with Marketbrain to develop a calculator to help merchants decide if free shipping was a good option for their online store.
@goose, @craig…This should work: Go into your shipping preferences and create a new price based shipping rate, set the purchase range to $50 and up and set the price of the shipping rate to 0.
Screenshot: http://cl.ly/BfJs
I’m with Heidi, I wish we could set it up so that it’s free shipping for orders more than a certain dollar amount. Price based shipping rates is not a good alternative for us as that would mean giving up carrier based shipping calculations site wide. That’s not really an option for us.
@JustinG You are able to set up your store to use Price Based Shipping and Carrier Shipping at the same time…
example: http://cl.ly/Bfxq
: ) Woo hoo!
Can this free shipping coupon be applied to only specific products or collections?
This a great addition! We would also like to offer free shipping for orders over $x, but only for those you have a Special Discount Code. Looking forward to that addition!
In the past, the price-based shipping system used the total price of the order, after applying any discounts now it is determined before applying discounts. This is absolutely ridiculous and with no warning your business should be ashamed to have such practices. This “little addition” is costing my company thousands of dollars and we powerless to change it. With the proliferation of deal sites we have offered great 1 time promotions but now have to pay to ship the customer’s order. This is totally unacceptable.
Appreciate the initiative guys, however I too am having the same issue as Myra.
I had a price based shipping rate set at zero, when the order price was zero. I had zero priced orders when customer redeemed group buying site vouchers. The were then able to select the free shipping (the price based shipping rate I’d set up) after applying the discount code. This no longer works.
Can you please change this part back so that the price based shipping rates apply to the post discount order price ASAP. Thanks!
@lisa I think I’m missing something wouldn’t free shipping on products/collections have the same results as the current “Free Shipping” code.
@veronica – Thanks for your thoughts, when we consider adding more discount codes we will certainly keep your idea in mind.
@myra, @Chris – Sorry to hear about this guys, this isn’t related to the Free Shipping discount code, but I’m sure support will be happy to help you come up with a solution to your issues http://support.shopify.com/
Fantastic! Thank you!!! Best news all year!
Mark, thanks for your response dated 10/11 at 10:51. Per your advice, I’ve taken this up with Shopify Support.
Their response has been that it actually is this change that is causing this issue. In order for this Free Shipping discount code option to be created, a technical change was required whereby price-based shipping rates are now determined before applying discounts, not after.
This actually reduces Shopify functionality as there is now no way to provide free postage with a separate discount code. As there was already was effectively a free postage option through the price based shipping rates, this change doesn’t add any functionality, it reduces it.
I’ve asked the support guys to raise this with the development team again to work out a way to provide free postage with a separate discount code, or revert to the previous sequence of applying price based shipping rates.
I thought I should reply to your response for the benefit of other users.
Mark, while I understand that if I wanted to allow for free shipping for an order amount above $ X, I can set up a shipping preference to allow for that, but the issue is that I would like to offer different types of discounts to my customers (i.e. 10% off for a limited time, Free shipping over a certain amount), but by setting the free shipping as a preference shipping rate, it allows the customer to enter another promotion and still qualify for free shipping (effectively getting two promotions). I won’t be able to afford supporting that. If a customer had to type a code for free shipping for orders over a certain amount (rather than just automatically qualifying for it), then they couldn’t enter a second code for another promotion. Is there anyway to allow for more flexiibility in the free shipping promotional code feature to allow for orders over a certain amount to be free, given the above clarification?
Mark, I also wanted to add a thought about the current way the free shipping promotion works. I may be missing something, but typically lower shipping rates are set for smaller sized orders, so when allowing a free shipping promotion for a certain rate amount and less, it effectively is encouraging the customer to order small amounts to qualify for free shipping. If a customer has a large quantity order to place, this may lead to them placing many small orders which would make it very inefficient for a store owner to fulfill or manage. Promotions should encourage more buying rather than less. Just a thought though I accept that I may be missing something.
I forgot to add a little bit of love. Thank you so much for working on enhancing site functionality. Great work! It is really appreciated.
Mark,
I want to know if I can set a free shipping on one specific product (discount code doesn’t have that option).
I want to sell show tickets but if I set a discount code with a price based discount I sell two of them for 40$. I have t-shirts that we sell 35$ we don’t want the customer to get the free shipping on a t-shirt. What we could do? Because the shipping of number 10# envelope don’t cost a lot compared to a box.
Thank you
Great! I was waiting for this feature!! Thank you!!
Perfect timing for the holidays. Thanks guys.
Can free shipping be applied only to specific products and/or collections?
Mark,
This has been a good addition, customers always like this. Thanks for your work and timely and helpful updates.
However free shipping codes can also be a lot of hassle for some stores, such as clothing stores, and especially at xmas time.
The errors above are just some that I had considered myself.
Also, we had an order today and the buyer used the code and got free express delivery, which we weren’t wanting to allow. It seems that they selected the more expensive delivery option and then entered the code. It then took off the cost of express delivery. The code was only intended for basic shipping (as we thought Shopify implied at launch?). Then the pricing on the Shopify order receipt was all mixed up as a result of this (showed -£3, when it was actually -£6 that had come off the total).
So maybe have a look at this bug also…
BTW Mark, you have been very helpful in the past and I really need your help – can you ask the team to have a look at the Google Product Search integration as it is totally stuffed now for my store since the update a few months ago. It seems that the Shopify bugs aren’t getting fixed. Shopify is not integrating with GPS optimally and we are now always at the bottom or not appearing at all.. :(
We need to be able to export live product data with all the correct fields to make an up-to-date tab delimited file for GPS ourselves (Retail Tower is no good). There is no current way to do this yet it would only take Shopify 10 mins to fix this export facility, or just fix the integration and offer some manual control over it. So I’m left juggling with the Shopify API that doesn’t work and taking another few days building the files myself.
Many thanks,
Chris
Thanks for the feedback everyone. We do have more features in the pipeline for Shopify and I appreciate everyones thoughts.
If you have any support related feedback please email support.myshopify.com. I don’t want anyone to overlook your problems because it was in a blog comment.
@Chris I spoke with our support, and they were misinformed early on about the issue – sorry about the confusion. The bug was discovered while we were developing the feature, but the feature is separate from the bug. We are coming with ideas on how we can accommodate groupon style discounts. I apologize for any trouble you’ve had and I’m sure our support team can come up with a solution to make amends.
@Housh, we are looking into adding new discount types that might solve this issue. I can’t promise a timeline, but is one of our priorities. We have some big ideas on how to improve discounts/sales functionality in Shopify. Thank you so much for your additional feedback.
@Carlito not yet. I can tell you this is a problem we have our eye on though.
@ignacio not yet, we are mapping out a possible new feature that might solve this. No timeline yet.
@Chris Thanks! Could you please submit a ticket on this issue at support.myshopify.com? I would like to know the order # and your shop name and we will definitely get back to you. I just did a quick test and can’t replicate the issue. In regards to Google Product Search, I’m not that familiar with the integration in Shopify, but I’ll ask the person responsible for this side of Shopify in the office. I recommend creating a support ticket at support.myshopify.com about this issue. That will give you a proper answer, we can formally log your suggestions and let you know when the issue is solved.
hopefully i’m just missing something…
I need to offer a free shipping coupon but just for First Class mail… which I realize you can limit the shipping rate when creating the coupon so let’s say limit to $4.90 and under ($4.95 is priority flat rate). If someone orders more weight than First Class allows they will not have the option of Free Shipping even though they have a coupon. So if I raise the amount, it allows customers to “upgrade” their shipping on lighter, smaller orders to Priority or Express.
I think the shipping coupon should be tied to a particular customized rate only, called “Free Shipping” so that we can choose the cheapest option for shipping when we’re paying for it.
Is there a work-around? There’s a news story on our store tonight and they’re announcing our Free Shipping… this could cause us a lot of extra work and problems if we can’t get a solution soon.
Do you believe that Syria spying on dissidents?
I ran into a discount problem yesterday that I wanted to bring up here.
We were looking to do a promotion for a collection in our store like one of the following: buy any two pieces from collection X and get 15% off; or spend over $30 on collection Y and get 15% off.
Unfortunately there’s no way to do this.
I really like this feature but I’d like to be able to use it for free shipping over a $ limit not under that limit.
Eg. A customer spends over $200 then they get free shipping.
When can we add free shipping to individual products? I do not want a free shipping coupon for price ranges because it then affects all products. Thanks!