Last Updated on by Dan S
Originally Published February 5, 2020.


Combining a discount code with free shipping in Shopify

For many Shopify store owners, I’m sure you’ve wanted to offer discounts on your products, as well as free shipping. Having great promotions like this is key for your customers, as they’re more likely to return to your store for future sales.

At the moment, there is no easy way to achieve this for online stores, however, Shopify did announce they will soon manage this natively.

For Shopify POS, please see this article.

In the meantime, you can try the following method.

You can attempt to change the shipping rate in your store, however, this can only be changed per country, not product. It’s not the best solution if you’re looking to limit free shipping to certain products or collections.

Also, whilst not a viable option for all merchants, consider offering free Shipping at a certain threshold.

This is great for 2 reasons:

  • Once a customer reaches the free shipping requirement (e.g minimum basket of $50), they can still combine with discounts
  • This will naturally increase your Average Order Value by pushing customers to order more.

You can also communicate this method by either using a static header bar that displays a message such as “Free Shipping on all orders over $50” or you can use a motivator bar that will change dynamically based on the carts contents. It will display a message like “You are $37.01 away from Free Shipping”. This can be achieved with an app or some themes sometimes have this built in.

Creating a free shipping discount code

You can create a free shipping discount code that customers can enter at checkout on your store. This will not get applied automatically on their order, they’ll need to apply the code themselves.

If you want to offer your customers free shipping, you’ll need to set up a free shipping rate in the Shipping section of your Shopify store. This will get applied to all orders that meet the free shipping criteria you have set for that rate. This could be for a minimum spend of $50 for example.

Don’t forget to set a start and end date for your discount codes if this is needed.

 

I need combined discounts

Whilst this doesn’t really solve the combination issue, let’s look at some solutions that do:

 

Try an App to combine and stack discounts

As with most merchant pain points, there are some solutions in the form of apps.

Our favourite is Stackable discounts. The app works by combining all the discount percentages into one. You simply need to setup the codes in the app and it will work it’s magic.

stackable discounts

 

On Shopify Plus? Try checkout scripts

If you are on Shopify Plus, you will have access to checkout scripts. These can be created to achieve the exact behaviour you wish to obtain. For example, giving an order free shipping after is has been discounted. It requires someone with knowledge on Shopify Scripts which are programmed using Ruby.

shopify scripts