Free shipping on selected products: Boost your sales
Turn visitors to your website into customers by offering them free shipping on selected products. Especially concerning premium products, a discount of just a few euros does not constitute a true incentive to buy. Many customers regard free shipping, on the other hand, as a much better bargain. Good news for merchants: regardless of whether your special promotion is free shipping or a discount of 5 euros, the costs for merchants do not change. So, how can you offer a discount on selected products in your ePages online shop?
You must first create a new shipping method. In the Settings menu, select Delivery and payment.
Assign a name to the new shipping method such as Special offer – free shipping. Then assign it the computational model Free shipping. Save to confirm this, and then click on the newly created shipping method. On the following tab, you can specify the countries for which free shipping is available.
On this same tab, you must make the shipping method visible. At this point, your customers could choose this method in the shopping basket as the preferred shipping method for all purchases. In order to prevent this and to ensure that customers can select free shipping only for certain products, you must modify your products’ settings.
 | In the product list, select via mouse click a product for which you wish to offer free shipping. You will then see the Prices/Inventory/Delivery tab. |
| In the right half of this tab, there is a blue Display delivery information entry with a small blue plus sign. Click here and select Restrict selection of shipping methods. Specify Special offer – free shipping as the sole shipping method for this product. |  |
When a customer places this product into their shopping basket, the preconfigured shipping method will automatically be applied. In our example, no shipping costs will be calculated. Even though the system will notify the customer of free shipping, it doesn’t hurt to emphasize this special promotion in the product description. Do so by modifying the respective product texts via the Description tab.
Repeat the aforementioned steps regarding all products for which you’d like to offer free shipping. To ensure that your customers get free shipping only for those products specified by you, you must manually deactivate the new Special offer – free shipping method (similarly to description above) for all other products in your shop.
 | If you have a lot of products, you better use the import/export-functionality of your ePages shop. Klick on Import and export in the menu Products |
| Choose Products as the Object Type you which to export. As the Delimiter you can use the semi-colon. Klick on Export in order to start. Your shopsystem will generate you a CSV file which you can easily open with a spreadsheet editor like Excel. |  |
Search within the document for the colum [ShippingMethods]. If there isn´t anything written here for a specific product, the system will allow every shipping method. If you want to allow only one specific shipping method for a product, fill in the ID of the method here. You can find the ID of every shipping method on its tab at Settings -> Delivery and Payment. If you want to allow more than one shipping method for a specific product, fill in the ID of every method you want to allowe. As a seperator you have to use "~" – the so called tilde.
After finishing your setup work close and save the CSV file. You can now import it again to your shop using the Import and export tab. All the changes will be transferd to your system.
Volker Schwarz
Volker Schwarz studied German, History and Politics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. From 2004 to 2009 he worked as a freelancer for several marketing and communications companies in Hamburg, including e-commerce companies. Between August 2009 and December 2011, he worked as an online editor at ePages.
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