Free Plus Shipping Funnel 2019

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Shopify Free Plus Shipping is a great way to get leads and make money with dropshipping. Free Plus Shipping method has been used for quit a while now, but it is still pretty effective if you do it right. I will explain in this article what is Free Plus Shipping Shopify method for dropshipping and why you should use it sometimes even if you are losing out money.

1. What Is Free Plus Shipping

First of all, let’s understand the concept of free plus shipping model.

What it essentially means is getting an item for free but paying the shipping and handling cost.

You might think why would you be giving out free products to your customers, would it not mean that you are losing money.

The reality is that in most cases you are not losing money but sometimes even making money giving out free products.

It sounds very appealing and hopefully, that is what your customers think as well.

The way you earn your money is very simple. Usually, you just incorporate all of your costs into the shipping price.

For example, you find a necklace on Aliexpress that costs $2. But instead of putting a margin on the $2 you put it in your shop as $0.

You set the shipping as $9.99 and you have $7 margin to play with even if the product appears as free in your store.

It is important to know your other costs, such as how much money you will pay for advertising.

For example, if you pay only $1 per conversion, then perhaps you can set your shipping costs as low as $7.99.

On the other hand, if you are spending $5 or more on ads, you probably want to have your shipping more than $9.99.

Though, I would advise not to go with more than $11.99 for shipping. That seems to be the limit on how much people are willing to pay for shipping on a free item.

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2. When To Use Free Plus Shipping

3. Why Free Plus Shipping Works

As you can guess, just having the power of using the word ‘FREE’ can work wonders for your store.

It is just a simple human psychology that we love free products and get very easily distracted when we see that word.

It works especially great with advertising. It is a lot easier to get click-throughs when you are ‘giving products away’ rather than selling them.

If people think the item is really free they put in the time to check it and put it into their cart, so they already take steps they might not otherwise do.

So, once they see that they do need to pay for shipping, they feel already invested and often just do it.

Besides that people often expect to pay for shipping one way or another, so they do not mind it as much even if it is a bit higher.

But they are not usually used to seeing free items just being given away by stores.

If a customer would see a product for $9.99 in your store it would be just yet another product.

But having that same product as Free product creates an excitement that attracts customers.

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4. Free Plus Shipping Hack

As I mentioned there are people out there who make great money with just Free Plus Shipping products, but I think that barely touches its potential.

I see Free Plus Shipping method more as a marketing way to attract people to my store and sell other products to them.

Potentially you can make a lot more money on selling your other products while using Free Plus Shipping method.

What you want to do essentially is create upsell, down-sell and cross-sell products related to your Free Plus Shipping method.

If you are selling a free plus shipping product you might want to do $50 upsell product and $25 down-sell product.

If you do this really well you can actually create a funnel in which the cross-sell products would be almost essential to have with the free plus shipping offer product.

In some cases, you do not even care if you are going to make money with the free plus shipping offer or not.

Sometimes you might break even or even lose money with the free plus shipping product.

However, if you sell other products well on top of the free product offer, then you will end up making a lot of money.

It might make more sense to use Free Plus Shipping method for your ads rather than advertising the higher priced products separately.

Besides up-sells, down-sells and cross-sells that happen right away in your store you also need to calculate your long-term revenue from the customer brought with the free plus shipping method.

One great think about this is that even if you did not make any money with the plus free shipping product, you got the customers email.

Now, you can email the customer and have pretty high chance to make some sales via your email sequences.

Besides that, you, of course, can retarget those customers with other product advertising.

Even if you did not make any money you have gained the customers’ data and they have already opened their wallet for you.

With this you can make a lot of money in the future and that is why I say sometimes even losing money on free plus shipping offer can make sense.

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Conclusion

Free Plus Shipping model has been used already for a few years and even though it is not as effective as it used to be, there are still plenty of cases where it works great.

As I explained I usually see the free plus shipping model as a tool to acquire leads and then try to sell them more expensive products from there.

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