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In this video, Matt Winn from Volusion discusses five key points to follow when your online business runs a free shipping promotion through its ecommerce site. These include performing a detailed pricing analysis, studying costs of different shipping providers, and marketing the promo as much as possible.

Happy November to you all! In case you haven’t heard, the holiday season for ecommerce has officially begun. With this money-making time upon us, it’s quite normal for you to be thinking about which promos are the best boosters for sales. Inevitably, the question of free shipping will arise.

While tempting, offering free shipping can quickly diminish your margins and can even put you in the negative. So before you hit the go button, make sure to watch this video and follow the guidelines listed. Pay special attention to tips #1 and #5. As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

Five Tips to Running an Effective Free Shipping Promo

Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m an Online Communications Specialist here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Today we’re going to discuss a really important and appealing promotion to your customers, but often one that eats away at your margins. This is the inevitable free shipping coupon. So to make sure that you’re running it effectively, pay close attention and follow these tips.

First and foremost, before you start this free shipping promo, or really any promo, you need to perform a detailed pricing analysis. Are you going to be able to offer this across all of your product line? Or is it only going to be available for a specific amount, such as free shipping with a $50 purchase?  Studying each of your margins and the shipping costs really allows you to make sure that you don’t eat away too many of your margins by offering this free shipping promo.

Number Two: along the same lines, make sure you determine the length of the promo ahead of time. Are you going to do a one-day blowout sale? Is it going to be for a week or two? The entire season? Again, by setting limitations will ensure that you don’t’ eat away all of your bottom line with this promo.

Number Three: Evaluate your shipping providers. Now of course with different products and different shipping providers, there’s going to be different costs. So evaluate all of the shipping providers that you’re using and see if there’s one that costs substantially less than another. If you can cut a couple and only run the free shipping promo through one, it will definitely give you more bang for your buck.

Number Four: If you’re going to run it, blow it out of the water. Again, free shipping is one of the most appealing promotions to any ecommerce shopper out there. So if you’re going to do it, include it in all of your communications and make sure you make the most of it during the timeframe.

Last but not least, evaluate and learn from the promo. Did you run it correctly? Did you run it as effectively as possible? Did you lose money on it? Were you not prepared? Whatever the case, make sure you study the metrics after it’s over and apply your lessons for next time around, if there is one.

Hopefully this is helpful in running your free shipping campaigns. If you have any questions, we’re happy to help. From me to you, happy selling!