Free Shipping with Weight Limit in WooCommerce

Shipping Cost Per Weight
Author Bartosz Gajewski
Updated:
2020-08-17
Reading time:
3 minutes read

Free shipping can be a very effective marketing tool that should benefit both the customer and the store owner. But, if the order weight exceeded a certain amount, it starts being unprofitable. The best solution to avoid that is the weight limit. So, how to set free shipping with the weight limit in WooCommerce?

Different ways to offer free shipping in WooCommerce

Shipping options play a pivotal role in an online shopper’s decision. That’s the reason why free shipping is so popular marketing tool. There are a few different ways to offer free shipping in your store:

  • For all products. It can be limited to some time period or available all the time.
  • For orders over a specific amount. That’s the most popular method that you can find in most of the stores.
  • When a customer buys two or more items. A great way for Up-selling.

In all of those examples, shipping weight can be an issue. If the products are heavy and very pricey to ship, it will end up costing more than the profit of the order. That’s something that every store owner wants to avoid.

In this article, I’ll show you how to set free shipping with weight limits for two of the mentioned methods.

Use trusted table rate plugin

To set free shipping with weight limit in WooCommerce, you need a trusted and feature-rich plugin. As usual, we recommend using Flexible Shipping – one of the best shipping plugins for WooCommerce. It’s used by 241,778 stores on a daily basis and with 4.9 rating in WordPress repository. This time, to achieve the weight limit, you have to use the PRO version of the plugin.

Flexible Shipping PRO WooCommerce £70.39

The best Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce. Period. Create shipping rules based on weight, order totals or item count.

Add to cart or View Details
100,000+ Active Installations
Last Updated: 2024-03-26
Works with WooCommerce 8.4 - 8.7.x

Now, as we have the right plugin, let’s set the weight limit for a few different free shipping scenarios. We have prepared the complete guide on how to configure WooCommerce Free Shipping like a pro, that should be helpful.

Free shipping up to a certain weight

First, something simple. Let’s assume that you offer free shipping for all of your products. It can be a time-limited option or ongoing promotion. To set free shipping for all products up to a certain weight, just add two shipping rules.

Free shipping up to a certain weight - rules

If the total weight of your customer’s cart will exceed 5 kg (or any other weight unit in WooCommerce), the free shipping method won’t display on the checkout page. To not leave your customer without any shipping method, you can add another shipping method using Flexible Shipping that will be available for orders above 5 kg. You can read how to do this with our weight based shipping tutorial.

You can also set the shipping cost inside one shipping method. In this case, change the order of the rules, select Stop instead of Cancel and fill in the rule cost is field.

Free shipping up to a certain weight - second option

If you want to display additional label for free shipping, enter it in the Free Shipping Label field and leave the Free Shipping field empty.

free shipping label

Free shipping over amount with weight limit

Now, the most popular situation. Setting free shipping over amount with Flexible Shipping is really simple. We have covered this topic in this article. Adding a weight limit to that shipping scenario is also a very easy thing.

First, set the minimum order amount for free shipping and enter the Free Shipping Label.

Free shipping label for free shipping over amount

Then, you’ll have to add the shipping rules. You can adjust them to your shipping scenario, but to set the weight limit, you have to add additional rule. In my example, it’s the second rule that will cancel that shipping method when the total weight of your customer’s cart will exceed 5 kg. 

Free shipping over amount with weight limit

To not leave your customer without any shipping method, you can add another shipping method using Flexible Shipping that will be available only for orders above 5 kg.

Like in the previous example, you can also set the shipping cost inside one shipping method. To achieve this, just change the rules with the following pattern.

WooCommerce Free Shipping with Weight Limit - shipping rules

Remember, that rules are called in the order of appearance, so it’s very important to use this pattern correctly.

Free Shipping with Weight Limit in WooCommerce

As you can see, setting free shipping with weight limit in WooCommerce is not complicated. With the right plugin, it’s basically adding one rule to the shipping method. I hope that this article will be helpful. Good luck!

 

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