Online Shipping Costs Infographic
The second half of the infographic below has some great stats for eCommerce businesses to consider. For instance, did you know nearly a quarter of shoppers say high shipping costs have discouraged them from making online purchases? Or that nearly half of online shoppers have abandoned carts when they find out the shipping costs?
One way to avoid shopping card abandonment is to east into the price of shipping instead of giving them sticker shock at the end. In other words, show their order total, and shipping total in a small window at the top-right of their screen so they know what they’re spending as they shop. Always show figures from the cheapest shipping option; they can upgrade at checkout if they want it faster.
Check out the last statistic. In a world of price comparison shopping engines and internet-savvy shoppers, this is a very important thing to consider.
An interesting aside – I worked for an eCommerce company once that did a lot of shipping cost tests on email offers. For these particular customers, it seems that one-cent shipping was preferable to “free” shipping. What shipping cost tests have you done and what were the findings? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
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Just ran a very successful free delivery on orders over $150 on my commerce site. While many sites leave a threshold like this permanently, I found that the urgency that our “last day for free delivery” emails and web copy created was so compelling that it makes sense for us to offer this as a time sensitive promo a few times a year.