You’ll find that the Internet is chock-full of surveys and studies that clearly indicate that offering free shipping can greatly increase conversion rates, profits, and the bottom line. Studies have also found that offering free shipping and no-hassle returns removes buyer’s remorse and builds repeat purchases and customer loyalty.
For example, the results of the North American Technographics Retail Online Benchmark Recontact Survey revealed that 44% of online shoppers abandoned their online purchases in the shopping cart because shipping and handling costs were just too high.
In other articles, such as “Can shipping costs affect online sales?,“ 93% of shoppers said that free shipping would encourage them to buy more products online. That same survey also found that 67% had purchased items in a store rather than online in order to avoid shipping costs, and that 65% of them chose “in store pick-up” for that very same reason.
However, a little more Internet research reveals that free shipping is not always a magic bullet. “How to Offer Free Shipping without Going Broke” found that although 46% of online sellers thought that offering free shipping increased their profits, nearly one third of them said that it did not.
And then there’s that pesky cost of free shipping. Just as there is no free lunch, the expenses for shipping must be absorbed somewhere in the price of doing business Your initial thought may be that profit margins are just too slim to make it work on all your items.
But there are other free shipping options, and if offering it across the board won’t work for your bottom line, consider trying some of these ideas:
However, don’t believe that offering free shipping is going to solve all of your online woes. An article entitled “The Psychology Behind Free Shipping: Does It Work?” points out that offering free shipping will only work when shoppers are in the right phase of the Buy Cycle. “You can’t make someone purchase just by saying “free shipping“ if they’re not even sure that your product is the right one,” Smith said.