In our experience, both approaches work and usually they are used for different goals with different types of Shoppers.
FREE Plus Shipping or "Free, Just Pay Shipping" works best for converting cold traffic into new customers.
It's not easy for new Shoppers to trust a brand they have never bought from before with their hard earned money over the internet. So success in marketing to them depends heavily on making sure new Shoppers can get great value with their first order at almost no risk.
Building trust gradually in small steps is required in any relationship and your relationship with your Shoppers is no exception. For example, romantic relationships are best started with a coffee, rather than asking someone to move in with you right after you met them.
"Free, Just pay shipping" offers are low risk, high value deals designed to make it easy for new customers to give you a chance. Receiving value from you builds customer trust, and makes it likely that they will buy again from you and buy costlier products.
Unbranded starter products with high perceived value are perfect for such an offer.
Eg: Ear-rings and pendants, fishing bait/hooks, flashlights, socks, protein shaker bottles, lipsticks, supplements, essential oils, themed t-shirts etc
An ideal item allows you to charge reasonable shipping rates and still break even on the return on Ad Spend.
"FREE Shipping" on the other hand works best for selling more to people who have bought from you before and already trust you, increasing lifetime revenues per customer.
FREE Shipping offers help Shoppers in avoiding procrastination and if paired with urgency can help them pull the trigger right away. It also encourages shoppers to buy more items since they are saving on the shipping of every item they purchase.
FREE Shipping offers can be sent to your subscribers to bring them back to your store and can be a great way to promote more costly products on your store.
PS:
We noticed how difficult it can be to run "Free, Just Pay Shipping" promotions on Shopify stores. The only options right now seem to be
- use independent platforms dedicated to doing sales funnels and treat the Shopify store as just a backend
- or use workarounds by setting shipping rates for special weights, but that can be confusing, time consuming and hard to get right.
We created the Gro Funnels shopify app to help merchants quickly add a Free, Just Pay Shipping sales funnel to their Shopify store without having to spend time making workarounds work or having to use tools from outside the Shopify ecosystem.
