Accepting credit cards, warehouses, and shipping and fulfilling orders
Hello -
I would like to offer a 'Free Shipping' option to customers for a yearly fee. Is there a way to do this in Shopify that will
1) automatically give the member free shipping when they shop or a custom order is created by me?
2) automatically cancel free shipping once the year is up?
Thank you so much!
-KathyE
Hi there,
That's a really interesting idea. So, you could have a product in your store for people to purchase the membership. To do that, it might be easiest to use a membership app like Bold Memberships or AAA Membership. This would handle automatic tagging when someone becomes a member and removal if their membership lapses, as well as reminder emails. Otherwise, you would have to do all that manually.
Then, create a free shipping code for each year and have it be only applicable to people that are members. So you would tell new members that the free shipping code for 2018 is freeshipping2018 and then on Jan 1, that the free shipping code for 2019 is freeshipping2019. You can set up the discount so that it automatically and only applies to people who have memberships. So if someone's membership lapses, they will not be able to use the free shipping discount.
You can read more about creating discount codes here.
Hope that helps.
Todd
ShopClerk Order Tracking for Shopify
Hi,
The issue with this is that the customer would be only able to apply one discount at the checkout (as is the case for most Shopify stores). So special customer loyalty discounts would become more difficult to apply especially for members. This store https://mylola.com/products/lola-memberships is able to create memberships. Is there any way of investigating this to provide store owners with some insight into building shipping memberships to retain customers? Thanks.
Hi KathyE,
Nick here from Shopify.
This is a fantastic idea. It’s something which isn’t very common but unique at the same time. It could be an interesting way to create repeat customers to increase loyalty.
In saying all that, it is a feature which would not be native to the Shopify admin. I investigated this for you through some apps in the Shopify App store. For what you are looking to do, it feels like a membership app might be the best avenue for you to look down and there are two membership apps on the app store which stand out:
I did some testing on both of the apps and while a lot of what you’re looking to do can be accomplished (Automatically renew/ cancel after a year, create a membership based upon a specific order or order principles) I did have trouble linking it all to the shipping and specifically creating free shipping with them. I’ve reached out to both of the app developers on your behalf asking if the aspect of applying free shipping can be integrated into a membership for you and once I hear back from them, I will update you.
Another idea I did have was to create a membership with one of the apps for some products in your store (maybe all of them, depending on what you want exactly) where if someone is a member they can access a product which will, in turn, have free shipping which you have applied via the FREE shipping calculator app. So you would essentially have the products in the store twice but only give access to the members for one of them (nobody else would see the duplicate product) where you would apply free shipping to it.
Once again, this is a great idea, but also quite complex to put together. Hopefully, this helps and don’t hesitate to ask any other questions. I’ll be in touch once either of the app developers gets back to me also.
All the best, Nick
To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.
It’s unfortunate that Shopify does not make this easy. I did find a workaround until shopify changed the ability to add 3rd party shipping rates on my plan. This is the work around: I was able to successfully do this with the Shipeasy app on shopify app store. They can help you install it. You create a product for the membership and the app tags anyone who purchases that product. Then, they are tagged in recharge (which you also need or something like it that will do recurring billing) and that sets up the billing cycle you want. The shipeasy folks are highly responsive and helpful and they can help you set up the scenario you want to make this happen. Big disclaimer is you need Shopify Advanced, which is $299 per month…..you must have that plan as shipeasy is a 3rd party shipping API. This is why I had to drop it, which is so unfortunate.
Hi KathyE,
I heard back from the team at Bold who develop the Bold Memberships app. They said the following:
"Unfortunately, we currently are unable to apply tag-based shipping rates, primarily within the Memberships app. But used in conjunction with another app like "Bespoke Shipping" or "Intuitive Shipping" which both have the ability to apply tag-based shipping rates, the merchant that you're in communication with could use our app to apply the membership tag, and then let the shipping app handle the free shipping"
While they don't have the ability to apply memberships to shipping rates, they do mention something similar along the lines of what Todd and myself did whereas you can still use the membership concept but apply the shipping aspect a slightly different way.
Hope this helps.
All the best, Nick
To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.
Hi Nick,
So in short...
The MEMBERSHIP app applies the tag that either of the other two SHIPPING apps can the read and use. If we utilize this approach we can offer a membership that provides free shipping for any period of time ranging from a day (not saying I would), to a month, year or infinity correct?
Also, will the "member" need to apply a discount code or can this be an automatic discount that they get based on the tag the membership applied to their account? The auto application is really what I want.
Many thanks,
Sam
I dont understand why free shipping cannot be automatic based on customer tags.
I do not want to manage unique codes for free shipping for each one of my membership customers.
You allow for automatic discounts on product tags, why can this not be done for customer tags....
Seems like a simple code change to me.
Any reason shopify didnt respond to this?
Looking to introduce this too in the UK
We want free shipping to apply automatically to membership customers rather than involve a discount code as it will prevent the using a different promotional code. But the shipping rate app solution isn't possible here as courier calculated shipping rates isn't available in the UK.
free shipping membership is becoming increasingly common this needs to be an option. please could someone assist?
Shopify please can you look at this thread? Free shipping is a vital part of a lot of shoppers experience and a key motivator and friction point. With Amazon Prime being such a mass market experience, we would like to be able to offer the same on Shopify. Pay for an annual free shipping pass.
This shopify store does it so can anyone reverse engineer to work out how they are offering it?
I agree! I am looking for a free shipping membership like Amazon Prime. Shopify? Are you out there?!
Any news on this topic since 2021?
Thank you SO MUCH Nick and Todd! This helps tremendously!! 😄
-Kathy
I found this thread because I was equally frustrated at the inability to accomplish this (and I thought I was the only one with the idea - ha!). I even went as far as to consider developing a private app, but that would have been almost $2K. Alas, I found a work around that, well, WORKS! And does not cost money.
I've found so much support on these forums, I'm thrilled to try to pay it forward. Here's what I did:
1. I created a shipping method that was a "pay once/get free shipping all year" kind of deal.
2. I downloaded the Shopify Flow app, and created a flow that creates a CUSTOMER tag based on the Shipping Method. (Flow chat support showed me how to do this in one minute. Easy peasy.
3. Then I created a dynamic Customer Segment that includes all customers who have that new shipping method tag.
4. Now go into Discounts and create a Free Shipping Discount Code that applies only to customers in that segment. Unfortunately Shopify will not allow this to be an automatic discount. But don't worry because lastly...
5. I downloaded the Discount Mixer App (also free) and created a automatic campaign that works for that customer segment. (Also needed a little support from their chat, but it was quick and easy. And honestly once they showed me how to do it, it was pretty simple and I probably could have figured it out on my own.
And it works like a charm! My guess is that anyone can do this whole thing in 30-45 minutes. The hardest part was just finding the pieces of the puzzle, which now everyone has.
Let me know if it works for you!
Sounds great but how do you manage it expiring after 1 year?
By the way, one of my clients was also struggling with this, so we created a super simple app. There you can just create a membership product yourself, and if someone buys it, you tell the app to apply a membership to this customer that will be valid for the time you set (e.g. 1 year). This membership can include automatic discounts like shipping. The name is CustomerCards in case you want to check it out. The starter plan is 7.99 and has a free trial.
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