If you’ve shopped online, you’ve seen it. “Add $5.89 to your basket and get free shipping!” It feels… misleading? Dishonest? Manipulative?
After all, it’s not like the shipping is really free. The cost of shipping was factored into the price the company you’re buying from set. They’re just doing this “free shipping” trick to get you to buy more.
I actually like the strategy, though.
You see, though it is undoubtedly manipulative on the part of companies employing the strategy, from my perspective as a customer who is unlikely to purchase something additional just in the hopes of getting free shipping, it makes me think instead about how to better group purchases I make to take up fewer shipments.
Fewer, better-grouped shipments is better for the environment, which is something I care about. More than that, it also makes me take extra time to think through purchases before pulling the trigger. If I don’t have enough in my cart to receive free shipping, I’m likely to wait until I have more things I need to buy to fill out the order.
But if I wait that time, I also use that time to subconsciously consider whether I actually need the item I was planning to purchase. As often as not, I’ll decide that I didn’t need it after all during that interval and cancel the order. (And even better for the environment than fewer shipments is not purchasing something in the first place. Better for my wallet too.)
So, in the end, once you’ve taken a firm stance that you’re not going to purchase something you wouldn’t have solely to receive free shipping, the concept of shipping being free past a certain threshold actually serves to reduce shipments and to give you a buffer time to reconsider purchases.
There are probably measures of cart capacity other than cost of purchases that would better serve these goals, but this is a metric which appeals to both me and the companies that I’m purchasing from, so I’m willing to settle for it.
