How to Offer Free Shipping on BigCommerce

Hey guys, let's talk about how to give your customers free shipping because there's a couple different ways that you can do that in big commerce. Before we get started, my name is Kal, I'm a store owner just like you. And I'm a developer, I've been building big commerce stores since 2010. I've built a cobble. If you find this helpful, hit subscribe, so you could see more of me. And I'll tell you all kinds of other cool stuff too. All right, let me share my screen and talk about the first method which is by location. And this is really good if you have multiple shipping locations. Or if you want to just keep things simple.

This is my my go to first way to look at free shipping. And so let me show you, when you go into settings, and then shipping, let me just get back to there. So settings, and then shipping takes you to your shipping zones. And you may or may not have more than one configured, I have a United States shipping zone here on my demo store. It's not really configured, but it's there. And what you can do is click Configure. And right in here, you see the different shipping, shipping carriers, different quotation devices, the static shipping quotes and the real time shipping quotes. But you also see up here a free shipping method. So this is option number one. And if we toggle that on, it gives us some controls like to limit it to orders over a certain threshold like $75.

And you can choose to use the discounted order subtotal or not. And you can make products with a fixed shipping cost ineligible for free shipping. So there there is a a field on products so that you can say specifically this particular product is $100 to ship because oversize or something. And so this decides whether or not that still matters once they qualify for free shipping. So option number one is in your shipping, limited to orders over a certain amount. Or I mean, I guess you could just say free shipping for everybody. Woohoo. All right. So that's one way, and you would just click whatever and then submit. And now that's in place, you can turn it off with that toggle, and just hit done at the end. So that's free shipping method. Number one.

Free Shipping, free shipping, method number two, and three are pretty similar. And that's with a promotion. So if we go into marketing, and then promotions, now in promotions and the new promotion screen, which is, which looks like what you're seeing here, this came out about a year, maybe two years ago, it still feels new to me, because I've been around in big commerce for a while. But there are automatic promotions, these used to be called discounts. And then there are coupon promotions, which have always been called coupons. And so the difference is automatic promotions don't require a coupon code coupons do. And so this method is the same, it's just question of, Do you want to require a coupon to get the free shipping or not. So I'm going to show you how to do this under an automatic promotion, because that's probably what most of you guys are going to use. But it's basically the same thing. If you do a coupon, you just click on the coupon and then follow the same method, which is to click Create, and say create with the advanced editor.

And you can say free shipping. And it's got to have a start date, it's got to have this target, which automatically just matches if they're using our existing currency US dollar, you could add additional targeting rules if you want. And rules is where the good stuff is. So rules you come in here and there's this one that says spend $100 get free shipping, it's not really $100. They're just using $100 as an example dollar amount. So go ahead and choose spend $100 get free shipping, and you can see in the fine print, increase average order size, increase average order size with free shipping, when a threshold is met. thing, all right, apply template. And this takes us into the rules detail. And it says if the if the customer reaches an order subtotal of at least $100 then reward with free shipping and apply it to all zones. Now if you have multiple zones in here, you can apply it to only selected zones.

So maybe you have like US and Canada and you only want Canada to get free shipping or the US or whatever. Then you know like like you can do this in the shipping zones and apply it to a shipping zone. You can also do this with promotion. And the big difference between doing this with a promotion and doing this with a shipping zone is a promotion would typically be something that's not permanent number one and number two, you can also get fancy and say that it does or does Not combined with other promotions. Whereas if you're doing free shipping in a shipping method, that is promotion agnostic, and so it's not, it's not going to conflict with any coupons or promotions that say that they can't stack with other coupons and promotions, a little bit of a technical thing there for you.

So I'm just gonna leave this as all zones, but you can change this. So if you wanted to say, if you spent at least 25, then you get free shipping, that would be how it would work. And so that shows up here, if an order reaches a subtotal of $75, reward them with free shipping, you can daisy chain, some additional rules in here, if you want to give them more cool stuff. And then you can also say like, how I only want to give this to the next 100 people or something. And this is where you can decide if it can or cannot be used in conjunction with other promotions. So maybe you have a BOGO out there. And you don't want them to get BOGO and free shipping. Right. So this is where this becomes handy. And again, if that was if you had set this in the shipping zone, and they tried to use a BOGO coupon or promotion, that would totally work together because the the free shipping at the shipping level is not a promotion, right. All right, so I'm going to leave this as can be used in conjunction with promotions, you click Create promotion. And then now it shows up in our promotions tab as an active promotion. And we can toggle it on or off if we want to at any point here. And again, if you want to create this with a coupon, it's exactly the same except it's going to have you put in a coupon code so that you can have a coupon code specifically to give out to people to get that I guess I can just show you. Here it is. Right here, the very next screen. So here, here's where you could say like, three, shipping would be our coupon code, for example. Now otherwise, other than this, it's the exact same everything like targeting rules, all this kind of stuff is exactly the same down here. The only difference is you put in a shipping code to tell people okay, so went over shipping based or destination based, we went over automatic promotion, ie discount based coupon based. And the last way to Well, last way with a with an asterisk to get free shipping is actually on the product level. And I really never recommend this, right, because although this is kind of cool that you can do it product by product, and you can do it through the CSV. You know, to apply it to individual products, it gets a little bit messy when you have some products that are free and some products that are not free. Because you know this, you know, you could have 25 products in your cart that have free shipping, and then one that doesn't, and now you can trigger a shipping rule and they're going to pay 20 bucks for the whole order.

And they're gonna say, Well, what about all these other ones that these other products that had free shipping, and it's kind of a nightmare to manage this because like if you have 1000 products, what if you miss a couple, you know, for free shipping. So I don't like this method. But it is technically a method. I've had 1000s of clients, I don't know if any of them have ever actually used this. But let me show you. So when you go to edit a product, which you get to buy products for your products, and then just click into a product, I'm sure you know that right now, you scroll down to shipping details. And this is where you can specify a specific price. So this is like when I was showing you guys the shipping method version of free free shipping, where it said that you could exclude products that had a fixed shipping price. That's where this comes into play. So if this has like an LTL shipping cost, and you want to charge 100 bucks no matter what, there you go under bucks. But this is where the free shipping toggle would be for this product. Now this is, again product by product.

So if if they have a cart that's mixed with some products have free shipping, and some that aren't, then they're going to pay shipping for the ones that aren't. And these aren't going to calculate into that unless you toggle that selection and their shipping method. You can you can see like just by you know, the explanation is already getting complicated. And it is complicated. So I just wouldn't do this. I never do this. I don't I don't recommend it. It's a tool that you can use, but I don't know maybe it's right for somebody. If this solves your problem and you want to do like fix shipping or free shipping on a product basis. Let me know I'd love to hear like why this was a better fit for you than the other ones. But as you can see there's several different ways to get there. Sometimes people look at the shipping destination base and think it's kind of restrictive and they don't realize that there's you know, marketing type of free shipping that you could offer as well.

Have the marketing base, I think can also be locked down to certain customer groups and some other types of, you know, find find targeting, which is really nice. Whereas the destination base is just purely where's your destination? And so, you know which one's right for you? I don't know. But those are the options. And I hope that you know, one of these options works for you. If it doesn't, then the asterisk I mentioned previously is because there's actually one more that's not a big commerce feature, but it's an add on feature and that is called shipper HQ. shipper HQ is an app that you can get. So there is a cost to it.

There is a cost to it. And the cost varies based on you know, how complicated your your shipping scenario is. But shipper HQ can offer some extremely advanced scenarios. They can offer more, you know, real time shipping calculations with you know, other companies that aren't available through Bigcommerce like DHL, for example. They're just very very complicated what they can do so if you need something that really just doesn't fit into, you know, the native Big commerce shipping options and free shipping options. shipper HQ can say you know, they just avoid anything I've never really found a scenario that shipper HQ can't do now like I said, there's a cost but if you need complicated separate secure you guys, so I hope that helps you guys. I hope that gets you guys unstuck shows you guys some of the options. My name is Kyle, I appreciate you guys watching the video. Leave me a comment with what else you guys are stuck on because I'm you know, making videos every week trying to help you. And if you need a developer for your team for your site, reach out to my team at Epic design labs.com And we'd love to chat with you and see if it's a good fit. All right, thanks for now and I'll see you the next one. Thanks