With this article, we’ll cover the best ways and strategies to provide WooCommerce shipping discount to your customers. You will be able to get the benefits of free or discounted shipping costs without affecting the sales of the store in a long run. Most of the store owners are often inclined to provide shipping discounts or even free shiping to their customers. It is one of the best ways to improve the sales and popularity of your store. However, when it comes to discounts, WooCommerce store owners don’t really know how much is too much and what are the best ways to provide shipping discounts.
Best ways to provide WooCommerce Shipping Discounts
We’ve done the tiring task for you and have listed out the best WooCommerce shipping discount strategies. Read along.
1. Provide WooCommerce flat rate shipping
One of the easiest ways to ensure that the shipping discounts won’t hinder the sales of your store is to provide the WooCommerce Flat Rate shipping option. Most business owners use this shipping method to reduce the overall cost and attract new buyers. For example, providing a flat $10 shipping rates for all the products the customers buy. This way you can set an average shipping cost as a flat rate shipping. Since there is a fixed shipping cost no matter how much the customers buy, there are a lot of chances that the customer will buy multiple items.
2. Set up WooCommerce free shipping coupon
Providing WooCommerce free shipping can really boost your sales, but providing WooCommerce free shipping coupon will be most beneficial for marketing. You can go to WooCommerce and select the Coupons to add a coupon for your free shipping.
As you can see, the Allow free shipping option will help you offer free shipping using this coupon. But for this coupon to work, you must enable Free shipping under the WooCommerce Shipping settings.
3. Run promotional offers on your WooCommerce shipping methods
Promotional offer is one of the best ways to provide shipping discounts. The basis of promotions lies in the fact that shipping discount is provided until the customer fulfills special promotional criteria. Consider the promotional criteria below,
- Shipping rates will be discounted 10 percent if you buy 2 of the products from the same category.
- There will be $5 off for every 10 products bought from California in a single order.
You can easily see that to get the discounts, the customers will have to avail one of the two promotional offers. Only then will they be eligible for either the 10% discount of a flat $5 off on shipping. In WordPress based websites, you can easily provide such offers based on conditions such as the number of products bought, amount of weight added to the cart, shipping address, total cart value, etc. with the help of advances shipping plugins like WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping plugin.
4. Use special shipping carrier services to offer cheaper WooCommerce shipping rates
Sometimes the shipping carriers that you are using to ship the packages also provide some special discounts to their customers. Here is a list of all the discounts provided by the top shipping carriers.
UPS shipping services
- UPS SurePost: This is the UPS starter service for bulk shipping. There is no minimum shipment required per month, and the prices are based on weight. You do need to sign a Commitment To Ship agreement to get these prices.
- UPS Connect: This is UPS’ small business postage solution. They currently offer a 20% discount on air and international shipping for new subscribers. You can enjoy the UPS based negotiated shipping rates on your online store using WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin.
USPS shipping services
- USPS Regional Rate Priority Mail: A low-cost shipping alternative for commercial and online customers who currently use Priority Mail. This option includes up to $50 of insurance with most shipments, includes USPS Tracking, and there are no fuel surcharges. Also, you’ll get free Package Pickup service at your home or office.
- USPS Media Mail: A USPS mail class restricted to delivery of books, film, and recorded media. Generally, the cheapest way to ship heavy items up to 70 lbs, Media Mail is commonly referred to as the “Book Rate” among booksellers. However, you need to be careful that the contents of the package actually meet Media Mail requirements or you run the risk of the package being sent back to you along with a fine. USPS Business Solutions: Receive online shipping discounted rates and free USPS tracking.
FedEx shipping services
FedEx Save Now: Get up to a 16% discount on select FedEx Express services, and 8% off select FedEx Ground services. WooCommerce store owners can get all the perks of official FedEx shipping account with the help of WooCommerce FedEx Shipping plugin.
5. Maintain warehouses to reduce WooCommerce shipping costs for international locations
One of the disadvantages of providing international shipping is that the shipping rates tend to be higher. Especially, when talking about the shipping discount, the store owners take a huge blow in terms of the shipping rates that they need to pay. In such cases, one of the smartest ways is to work with some third party logistics (3PL) to take care of the international shipping. With the help of different warehouses, store owners can choose from where the shipment will go, based on the distance to the destination. This way store owners can save up to 30-40% on international shipping. However, one of the disadvantages of opting third-party logistics is that they generally work with large businesses that can provide a large volume of goods to ship overseas.
6. Adjust product prices based on shipping discounts
Normally, what will the customers enjoy more – High Prices with Free Shipping or Normal Prices with Standard Shipping rates? The answer to this question may vary from store to store. However, the trick lies in the ability to adjust the product price based on the type of shipping that you want to offer your customers. For example, if you are charging $10 for shipping a product that costs $200, then you can choose to provide Free Shipping for the same product by increasing the price to $210. This shipping rate adjustment not only attracts the customers but also allows the store owners to accommodate the actual shipping cost within the price of the products.
Another easy way to implement free shipping is using a WooCommerce discount plugin, like Barn2 Plugins’ WooCommerce Discount Manager. You can create custom discount rules to offer “free shipping” as an automatic discount matching your shipping fees, or create a “free shipping” product and automatically give it away to all customers, or only those whose orders meet certain criteria.
7. Offer subscription based WooCommerce shipping rates
One of the best ways to provide discounted shipping rates is to do it through subscription-based services. Similar to Amazon Prime, store owners can sell a subscription on their store. Based on the subscription, you can provide special perks to the customers. These special perks can include an option to faster shipping services like Next Day Delivery, Guaranteed 2 Days Delivery, etc., a free of cost Standard Shipping option and early access to the special offers in your store. This method will not only help increase the popularity of your store via word of mouth but it will also attract the customers towards the subscription. Even though you will have to ship your packages using faster services, but the charges will be covered under the time-based subscription charges in a long run.
You can read the article on Subscription based WooCommerce shipping to learn how to set this promotional strategy on your store.
Summary
This article talks about WooCommerce shipping discount and the importance it plays in increasing the sales of your store. Providing WooCommerce shipping discount has been one of those strategies which rarely fails to attract customers. How many times have you yourself suggested your friends, an online store that offers free shipping? When it comes to shipping, most of the store owners have no idea how to optimize the shipping discounts so they don’t have to bear the extra cost of shipping.
If you need any help setting up WooCommerce shipping on your store then feel free to Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Our team would be more than happy to help you do that. Happy selling!
