Free Shipping Using ShopSite

Posted on November 12, 2010, 9:55 am, by David Hills and received No Comments ».

Last time I covered the use of Free Shipping for increasing your profit and/or obtaining more customers (see Free Shipping – Is It Worth The Cost?)  This time I want to review how you can set up free shipping using ShopSite.

Free Shipping is available in ShopSite Manager and ShopSite Pro.  To access this feature, from the “Commerce Setup” menu, click on the “Shipping” button.  Near the bottom of the Shipping screen you’ll see the following:

From this section, select the minimum amount that a shopper must spend in order to qualify for free shipping.  You will need to decide whether to use the Product Total (the combined product cost before coupons or volume discounts are calculated) or the Subtotal (after discounts, but before tax and handling charges are applied) in determining if the Minimum Amount is reached.  You can also customize the Shipping Option Name to indicate the required minimum amount needed for free shipping, as well as the “Free Shipping Message that ShopSite displays as an alert, indicating that free shipping has been earned.

The next section indicates any restrictions that will be placed on a customer’s location when calculating free shipping.

In the example above, free shipping will only be allowed within the continental United States. ShopSite automatically fills in the zip codes necessary to exclude Hawaii or Alaska by default.

As a shopper, I will see a screen similar to the following when I have $50 worth of products added to my cart.

As you can see, there is an alert message notifying me that I’ve qualified for free shipping on my order.  Also, note that the Free Shipping option has already been selected for me.  If I want to pay more and receive my products quicker, I can still select a paid shipping option for 2-day or overnight delivery.

You might ask, “But what method is used to ship the products for free?”  Well, that’s the beauty of it.  You, as the merchant, determine which method is the least expensive to ship and use that method for your free shipping orders.  Depending on your circumstances, the best method for you may be “ground”, or it could be some other option.  You can indicate to the customer the method that will be used by including it in the Free Shipping Name, the Alert, or wherever you display your shipping options.  You can also just indicate a typical delivery time frame and then, depending on the products purchased, you select the best shipping method for your bottom line!

Next time we’ll cover Free Shipping Coupons in ShopSite.

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Free Shipping – Is It Worth The Cost?

Posted on November 4, 2010, 11:34 am, by David Hills and received 1 Comment ».

Free Shipping.  It seems like most sites offer it, so it must work to increase sales, right?  I know that I’ve added additional products to my cart so that I could get free shipping.  And I know of others that have done so, too.

All the big sites offer some form of free shipping, don’t they?  In checking the web, I see the following free shipping promotions:

  • Amazon.com provides free 2-day shipping to students for a year
  • EddieBauer.com is offering free shipping on any order that includes an outerwear purchase
  • WalMart.com offers free shipping if you have the product delivered to one of their stores
  • BackCountry.com ships all orders over $50 for free
  • Sears.com has free shipping for orders over $99

So, free shipping appears to be alive and well, as long as the shopper meets some requirement.  In trying to find some hard data regarding the relationship between free shipping and sales, I found that merchants could see sales increases of about 15% to 20%, which is pretty awesome!  But, of course, that increase comes at the price of swallowing the shipping costs.

The real question then becomes not whether free shipping increases your sales, but does it increase your profitability or get you new customers?  This is where you get the answer “it depends.”

One article that provides some real data on the viability of free shipping was from F. Curtis Barry & Company.  It is clear from their research that you will need to do some testing on your own to ascertain if offering free shipping will increase your profit.  The article points out the following facts:

  • The majority of the free shipping offers were tied to minimum orders.
  • 80% or more of all major businesses offer free shipping in some form during the Fall and Holiday seasons.
  • Raising prices on unique or exclusive merchandise could cover the cost of free shipping.
  • One merchant indicated they saw a better increase in sales by offering a 20% discount instead of free shipping.
  • There is a lot of concern in the industry that free shipping is conditioning the customer to expect never to have to pay for shipping and processing.

The bottom line is that you’ll have to evaluate not only your position in the market, but also that of your competitors.  If they are offering free shipping, you may need to do the same to remain competitive.  If they are not offering free shipping, then it could be a competitive advantage to you to have it as an option.  You will then need to decide which restrictions are necessary to ensure the shopper purchases enough so that your overall profit is increased when offering free shipping.

Next time I’ll cover how to set up Free Shipping using ShopSite.

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Holidays are Happy Times for Merchants

Posted on October 29, 2010, 6:29 am, by David Hills and received No Comments ».

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the Werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the Werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic’s,
And his hair was perfect.
Ahhwooooo… Werewolves of London, Huh! Draw blood!
Ahhwooooo… Werewolves of London..

From Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon

Halloween is upon us.  It is the second biggest holiday for retail sales (after Christmas) and this year will see even more spent on the holiday! As a merchant, you have hopefully already promoted any products that have a Halloween tie-in.  Whether those products include scary books, videos, music, decorations, food, cards, or costumes (of course!), they should be taking center stage.

Having a holiday-specific product page or category or daily special on your site is a must.  It allows shoppers to quickly find what they are looking for as well as encounter other items that they may not have considered yet.  This week, both of my daughters were searching our iTunes library (as well as a number of music sites) for Halloween-themed music.  I was surprised to discover that, when I went to Amazon’s MP3 Download site, there was not a link to suggest Halloween- or scary-themed songs.  Maybe everyone already has a copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London but there are other songs that this generation may not know about, like Donovan’s Season of the Witch, are also pretty cool.  Wait, I just realized that his song is now used in the latest Windows Phone 7 commercial, so I guess they’ll recognize it, but not know who originally did it!

Obviously, holiday-specific promotions apply to all holidays, especially to the upcoming Christmas holiday.  But they can also apply to big events.  For example, don’t put all of your Halloween stuff away right after Halloween.  Some of it may be in great demand when the next Harry Potter movie comes out November 19th.  Right now, with the World Series going on, baseball-theme items could also be hot, especially if you have San Francisco Giants or Texas Rangers specific items!

If you can, always tie products to the holidays.  In addition, look beyond the holidays to significant events.  There are many possibilities out there.

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