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Offering Free Shipping: Fact or Myth?

October 22, 2020 | Author: Andrew Maff
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On the 64th episode of Marketing Interruption, Andrew Maff reviews the age old myth of offering free shipping and whether it should be done or not. He talks about how if it can be done, it should be, but also how it's not a game-ender if you can't.

 

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TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:42

Hello, and welcome to episode number 64 of the marketing interruption podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Maffettone, and today I'm going to talk about free shipping. Is it a myth that you should do it? Or is it a fact? And it is a fact? Thank you rate review, subscribe, I will see you all tomorrow. That is how I want to end this podcast. Yes, you should do it. Here's the thing, if you can offer free shipping, you should absolutely do it. If you have to jack up the price of your product, but offer free shipping, you should still do it. If you're currently operating and you're not offering free shipping, and you're doing well. Then why would you do it, you're already fine. It comes down to every product, every business, every owner, every every aspect is different. So you have to make a decision for your own I hate the questions of like, well, what's the industry standard? Or, you know, my conversion rate is this and my you know, click through rate is this and what what should it be, it should be better, it should always be better, I don't give a shit what your metric is. I don't care what the industry standard is, it should be better, it should always be improving. Always, always be able to Abba always know that I always Abby can't spell.

 

01:55

Anyway, free shipping. So if you can, the benefits of free shipping are obvious, right? Minus the fact that your need to fight with Amazon because everyone thinks that they're not paying for shipping, they're actually already paying for shipping ahead of time because they're paying for their prime membership. However, you get so much with a prime membership. Now in Prime members, it's really not that expensive compared to how much people actually buy on Amazon, but they are kind of sort of already paying it. The other benefit, though, is that you have if you're running Google ads, you can put free shipping in your ad creative, you can put it in the shopping ads under underneath your price you can put there, you can staple it everywhere, every time you do a discount, instead of 20% off everything you can jack up your prices, and go 20% of everything and free shipping. It still works that way. But there's different product lines, right, you can't really do big, big heavy stuff, furniture and things like that free shipping can be very difficult to do. Because taking the the shipping price and putting that into the product line when your product is already several hundred dollars or several thousand dollars. And now shipping is gonna cost another couple hundred dollars. putting that into the price could cost you a sale. So things like that you have to think about. But if you're competing with people on Amazon, or you're competing with people on even wayfair if you're doing furniture, in some cases, you have to look at what are your competitors doing? And are they able to get away with free shipping? Or are they not doing it. And if they are getting away with free shipping, how much more expensive is their product than yours. So just certain things like that. But the free shipping thing really to me comes down if I had to, if I had to pick one of today's what we said is either a myth or a fact, I'm gonna go with it's a myth. It's a fact that you should look into it. And you should do it if you have the capability to do it. But it is a myth that you have to do it. There's a lot of shit Actually, I just I bought something today that I paid shipping for. And I hate paying shipping. But I really wanted this. I just got a firepit for the outside because it's beautiful out. And I bought a Steelers Adirondack chair because I wanted I wanted one. And they had 60% off, which is something ridiculous but it wasn't free shipping. And it was probably fucking fanatics or some NFL shop or something like that, which is the same thing. But they essentially what they did is instead of giving me free shipping, they did a ridiculous high discount where I went, Oh shit, I should get this now because who knows when they're gonna do this big of a discount again. And then they charged me shipping. Were what I ended up paying and shipping. If they had just given me free shipping, I would have gotten like, I don't know, like maybe 10 15% or something like that. So they did it the complete opposite way. We're not going to give you free shipping, but we're going to do a ridiculous discount and there's certain companies that you can't do that if you're a luxury brand and you're doing 60% off. Fun fact you're not a luxury brand your shit, you can't have a luxury brand name and do big discounts like that because it just belittles your brand. They are the NFL shop or fanatics or basically whatever the hell they are the same thing. They can do whatever the hell they want because they almost own the market. So they decided let's not do free shipping let's charge shipping so that we don't have to eat this cost. And let's just do these massive discounts. So you can kind of look at it in two ways do small discounts with free shipping you can do big discounts with no free shipping you can do no free shipping, just tell everyone you know about themselves and pay it there's so many different ways. So it comes down to your product line you have to do your research on what your competitors are doing. You have to do your research on what even similar companies are doing and then of course you have to do your research on Where are your competitors selling it might not even be on their site are they selling on Amazon because if they're on Amazon then most people may be going to Amazon to get it cuz they don't pay shipping. Again, I ranted today, which is getting kind of fun. I like that but I'm gonna end with a it's a myth, but is the fact you should try it and per usual shoot me an email if you have any questions and you want me to cover something marketing interruption@bluetuskr.com but rate review, subscribe. I will see you all tomorrow.

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