To offer free shipping or to not offer free shipping – that is the question.

More and more handmade sellers seem to be moving towards offering free shipping in their online stores – especially if you sell on Etsy, as they make it easy for a buyer to see in search which items have free shipping, and which don’t.

But – is free shipping something you can realistically offer? Can you make it work for you – or is it going to cost you more headaches and more money?

In this episode, I talk about my own experiment with offering free shipping, as well as a number of pros and cons – both from my own experience, and gleaned from discussion on Facebook with members of the Thriver Circle and the wider Create & Thrive community.

After listening, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic – either leave a comment below or come over to the TC FB group and share your thoughts using the hashtag #freeshipping.

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Quotes & Highlights

Pros:

• The psychological ‘win’ of offering free shipping – a lot of people will be more likely to buy.
• You won’t have people put off by expensive shipping, because they won’t know what is the item price, and what is the shipping cost.
• If you’re on Etsy, you’ll show up in the ‘free shipping’ search. BUT you can do this also by offering free shipping over a certain amount – write that in your listings (thanks to Lee Ann Richards for this hack she shared on the C&T FB page).
• You’ll be more competitive with those also offering free shipping. Especially in the beginning, it could help your business get sales faster.

Cons:

• If you offer free ‘economy’ shipping that doesn’t include tracking, or want to offer express post, some people will be confused if that’s not included in the ‘free’ shipping option. You will have to manage that – even if it’s right there in checkout, some people will not see it.
• If your items are large, heavy, or vary a lot in weight and size, it will be more of a headache to work out the shipping – especially if people order multiple items.
• International shipping might be super-expensive, and it might not work for you – in which case, offering only free domestic shipping could work.
• Some people actually like seeing separate item and shipping charges, and free shipping might put them off as they feel it’s disingenuous.
• Your mileage may vary – in some countries, international shipping particularly is super-expensive. If you ship a high volume, it may pay to look into alternative shipping options, such as couriers. (FedEx, DHL)
• Tax and bookeeping issues – you may still need to separate the shipping costs from the item costs for these purposes. We do this manually in Xero for GST purposes.
• You may feel like including shipping in your item price (which you will HAVE to do so you don’t lose out financially) will make your items too expensive.

If you don’t already, consider flat fee shipping, rather than compounded shipping costs. This encourages multiple purchasing.

An alternative to free shipping is to offer free shipping when people buy over a certain amount. This is a little like selling wholesale – you might ‘lose’ a bit of money you would have gotten, but you make more because people buy more.

Also, strongly consider offering free shipping with upgrades. For example, only the lowest cost (in Oz, this is the economy option internationally) option is free – if people want tracking, they need to upgrade. If they want express post, they need to upgrade even more.

What about doing different things in different places? For example, I have free shipping in my Etsy shop, BUT not on my website. At this stage, it’s because I wanted to see what impact switching to FREE would have on my etsy sales. I may decide to change my website too in the future. It means my item costs are a little different across the two sites, but as I list in AUD on one and USD on the other, this was happening anyway due to currency fluctuations.