Hi,

Can someone please explain to a simple Irish man what free shipping means in plain English and is it reliable

Thanks

Hi Ybuymore,

Welcome to Wholesale Forum

When you buy an item from the internet, then that product needs to be sent to your location; this is called "shipping". To ship a product fees need to be paid.

If a seller online states "Free shipping" then he means that there will be no extra shipping charges included in the price. The price that is mentioned for an article is the final price that you will be paying for it.

You could use Free Shipping to attract customers to buy your products, many online buyers do not want to think about all the steps involved in buying a product. They just want to pay and receive what they have ordered. You can include the shipping costs in your total product price, in this way shipping costs are covered on your side and the customer has a clean buy without to much fuss.

There are also buyers that just look at the lowest product price, so best would be to list some of the products in both ways:

1. Low product price --> Plus Shipping Charges

And

2. Higher product price --> Free Shipping

If a buyer is from another country then you should informing them correctly that shipping costs will be charged, international shipping fees are a lot higher then local shipping and it will be hard calculating an average.

It is important the you are honest about your shipping charges for each product, the main problem sellers and buyers online run into is shipping charges being higher then expected.

Hope this helps

However Mr.Ybuymore,

There are few drawbacks too...You will have to carefully list down products which, if sold with free shipping, would get you a good margin of profit and that who don't deserve free shipping. So basically its applicable depending upon the product category. You can get a bad feedback rating if you are found adding the shipping cost to non commodious goods and selling them by offering free shipping.

But as said above the advantages are huge if carried out the process carefully. Would also add strategy to what 'WholesaleMod' has explained above. You can also try out offering free shipping for items in the cart when they reach a certain level of shopping amount.

EG many sellers offer free shipping when the shopping cart amount reaches $100 , so if a buyer has done shopping of $95,he would be ultimately triggered to avail the benefit of getting free shipping buy purchasing another item to make the cart total going beyond $100.

Good luck