For those of you who are my fellow Etsians, I'm sure you've heard about a recent article written by some researchers at Wharton discussing the effects of free shipping on your shopping habits. To me this is an enlightening idea. I never thought about how the shipping fee changes my shopping patterns. Honestly, I never thought about this as something that has an effect on my online shopping...until I thought about it. When I had my son, I signed up for Amazon Mom and got a free year of Amazon Prime. Having the free shipping with Amazon, I started filtering my searches to only those items that were available for free shipping. When I make purchases from fabric.com, I always order the minimum amount to get me my free shipping. I could go on... It really does effect my shopping habits. I seek out free shipping and I have even been known to not purchase something online because I couldn't get free shipping. Now that I am a eCommerce business owner, this is something I should probably consider, and definitely have not.
I know when I started, my shipping fees were much higher. Since then I have readjusted my shipping prices, but have not thought to provide many incentives for free shipping. Perhaps this is a new incentive to offer over the holidays to see if it helps bring in some on line sales. For a majority of my current sales, this is not an issue as the are mostly local. I would hope that offering free shipping will attract new customers from across the country.
I'm curious, has anyone used this and seen a significant sales difference? Have you seen a difference even in comparison to a percentage discount? What are you thoughts on the idea of free shipping?
Hi there! I did it - for about 3 months, ostensibly to celebrate my year of selling on Etsy. Just got one sale! Since then, have returned to my usual modus operandi and have had 4 sales in the same number of months. I rest my case!
ReplyDeleteThink it's very much a case of what you're selling, how many sales you make and if, like me, it's an intermittent activity, free shipping really doesn't act as a come-on! Might for you though!
I only charge shipping for the first item, any addition items are free. So far, my sales have all been single items. I think the effect of free shipping is probably different for different kinds of vendors.
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