WooCommerce free shipping guide – set up and boost sales!

Entrepreneurs work hard to set and achieve their profit goals. Business is not a charity. That is why a lot of managers have a strong bias against offering anything for free. However, in this case, the expression is purely a marketing tool – used because it can significantly increase your sales. See how you can set up free shipping in your WooCommerce store.

Why is it worth offering free shipping in your store?

It may sound bizarre, but customers actually prefer the shipping cost to be hidden in the price and love to receive free shipping. The research data does not lie. Let’s take a look at some interesting facts:

• 96% of people surveyed by Lab42 said, that they would be more likely to make a purchase online if a shop offers free shipping.
• 93% of participants for a Return Customer survey chose free shipping when given a choice between discounted items or a bonus good with their purchase, assuming the same value for each. People prefer free shipping over discounts!
• According to One Marketing Land’s survey, 90% of customers think, that free shipping is the best incentive to shop online. That is most surely a huge percentage.
• High delivery charges are the number one reason causing consumers to abandon online purchases, according to a survey by PayPal and comScore. A shocking 43% of those surveyed didn’t pay for items in their shopping carts because shipping fees were too high.

Default WooCommerce free shipping setup

WooCommerce has a free shipping feature built-in. That’s great! It’s much easier to configure it when it’s supported, without the need for a plugin.

You need to go to the shipping zone to which you want to add your free shipping method (step 1). You’ll find it in WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping. Then you need to click on the Add shipping method button (step 2). Look at the screenshot:

A new window will pop up. You should select Free shipping:

After that you need to provide a Name, and the name is used to display a shipping method name in the cart and checkout. Look at the screenshot below:

After the configuration, the customer should see the following shipping method in the cart and checkout:

Conditions required to apply free shipping

The key feature in the WooCommerce Free shipping settings is the Free shipping requires… option. It differentiates the free shipping method from other methods: Flat rate and Local pickup.

This feature gives us all the options we need:

• No requirement – you can offer free shipping without any conditions. It will be offered to every customer in your store, for every order. If your pricing strategy allows for such a shipping method, feel free to configure it this way!.
• Valid free shipping coupon – the first option for WooCommerce free shipping is to generate a valid free shipping coupon. That coupon could be distributed exclusively via newsletter or social media. Configure the WooCommerce Free shipping method the way you need, and the way it fits your store’s marketing vision. How to generate WooCommerce free shipping coupon for marketing purposes? Just go to WooCommerce → Coupons → Add new and mark the Allow free shipping checkbox.
• Minimum order amount – Free shipping is a great marketing solution for generating more sales. People often add more to the cart to get free shipping, so think about your costs and profits. Do you know when you can cover the shipping rate to still be profitable? Enter the amount in the Minimum order amount field and Save changes.
• Valid coupon AND/OR minimum order amount – WooCommerce free shipping method offers something more: the hybrid solution. You can configure the method to apply when:
  1. a customer provides a coupon for free shipping AND their order is above some amount,
  2. a customer provides a coupon OR their order is above some amount.

By default, you configure two shipping methods: Flat Rate for the optimal condition with no coupons or minimum order value and Free Shipping for the second one. However, there is a problem with such configuration. In the default WooCommerce options both of the shipping methods will show up in the cart.

What you probably want to achieve is to show only one of the shipping methods. It is possible! You just need one free plugin: Flexible Shipping! Read further and get to know more free shipping options for WooCommerce.

Flexible Shipping WooCommerce

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

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Last Updated: 2024-11-14

Works with WooCommerce 9.1 - 9.5.x

Set up WooCommerce Free Shipping over amount and hide other shipping methods when an order reaches a specific value

Use the Flexible Shipping plugin – it’s a free WooCommerce table rate shipping plugin that’s used daily by over 100,000 stores worldwide. This is probably the simplest solution to configure WooCommerce Free Shipping over amount. This plugin lets you create conditional shipping in your WooCommerce store, and it’s much more powerful than the regular flat rate shipping method. Learn how to install a plugin on WordPress.

How to configure WooCommerce Free Shipping over amount with the Flexible Shipping plugin?

Look:

You simply set 200 as Free Shipping. Next, you add only one table rate shipping rule by setting rule cost is: 10.

It will work the same way as the previous configuration, based on both Flat Rate and Free Shipping methods. However, it is definitely easier, because you will do the whole configuration in one shipping method. What’s more, the plugin has a built-in Free Shipping label option. If free shipping is applied, you can display additional information for your customer. It’s a small thing, but it works great as a UX touch, and it will also reduce abandoned shopping carts.

Most importantly, by using one shipping method, you will avoid the problem that occurred when using the default shipping methods – two shipping methods in cart.

WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping

The configuration example shown above was a rather basic use of the plugin. If your free shipping scenario is more complex check out the more advanced scenarios.

Free Shipping per Product

Offering free shipping in your online store is a great way to boost sales. However, for some products, it might be unprofitable. The solution for that is to disable free shipping for certain products.

How to exclude a product from free shipping in WooCommerce?

To exclude a product from free shipping in WooCommerce you need Flexible Shipping plugin.

1. The first step to do that will be adding the special shipping class for paid shipping products. Just go to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping → Shipping Classes → Add Shipping Class from the sidebar and create a new shipping class. Let’s call it Paid shipping for this guide.



If you don’t know how to set up that kind of shipping, you should check our guide about free shipping over amount.
2. Now, add all products that you want to exclude from free shipping to that shipping class. To do that, go to the edit product page, and in the Product data box select the new shipping class. 



3. Now that you have the right shipping class, it’s time to configure the shipping method. First, let’s take a look at free shipping over amount and how to exclude products from free shipping in that scenario. Add a new shipping method or edit the one you already have. Leave the Free Shipping field empty (we will use it in the next method). Make sure the Rules calculation is set to Sum.



4. Then, configure the shipping rules based on that example:



5. This way, your customer will pay $5 for shipping products from shipping class A up to $300. Over $300, the shipping fee for those products will be free. However, if there will be a product from Paid shipping class, it will always charge an additional $20 for shipping.

Of course, you can use more than one shipping class for that. Remember how to combine shipping classes in the Flexible Shipping plugin. 

Quantity-Based Free Shipping

Free shipping over amount is not the only way to set the free delivery options. You can use the quantity of the ordered products as the factor that will determine the no shipping fee. How to set up quantity-based free shipping?

Once you have the free shipping option set in the Flexible Shipping PRO plugin, you can set quantity based free shipping in WooCommerce. To do that just add a new rule based on Item (When: Item), set is from as your free shipping quantity, and set rule cost is 0. The last but very important thing is to choose Special action: Stop. This way, all other rules won’t be calculated when the client reaches free shipping over quantity.

Free shipping over different items in cart

The method above will apply to the quantity of products in the cart no matter if they are different or the same. With Flexible Shipping PRO plugin, you can also set free shipping over different items in cart. Just change When to Cart line item and free shipping will work only with five different products.

Free Shipping with Weight Limit

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 can be problematic. If you sell heavy products in your store you should consider setting a weight limit for free shipping and offer a different shipping option for overweight orders.

To do so, just add two shipping 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.

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.

Display Free Shipping Progress Bar

If you want to further strengthen your free shipping and increase the value of your sales cart, the free Flexible Shipping plugin has another feature: free shipping bar. Thanks to it, your customers will get information in their shopping cart and on the order page about the amount missing for free shipping in WooCommerce.

When setting up free shipping method, In the Free Shipping Threshold field enter the amount that will become the free shipping level. After filling in this field, you should be able to display the remaining amount for free shipping in WooCommerce. To do this, just check the ‘Left to free shipping’ notice box.

Having the “left to free shipping” notice enabled, it’s time to configure it. In the LFFS notice text field, you can change the free shipping bar message. Remember to use powerful Call To Action.

The final step is to turn on the free shipping progress bar itself. To do this, all you need to do is to enable the LFFS progress bar checkbox.

Remember to save the changes and that’s it! In addition to the free shipping itself, you can use other features of the Flexible Shipping plugin to configure your Shipping Scenario.

Having gone through the whole process, let’s check out how the free shipping progress bar looks in my test store using Storefront Theme.

Remember that the appearance of the progress bar depends on the WordPress theme you are using.

Summary

In this article, you have learned how to set up free shipping both with a WooCommerce default shipping method and also with a usage of Flexible Shipping plugin. Additionally, you have learned that you can set the free shipping per product, based on the quantity and even with weight limit. It’s crucial to offer the customers various free shipping methods as mentioned before in the article – the clients love receiving free shipping.