Use Promotions and Cross-Selling to Optimize Free Shipping

Combine the powerful tools of promotions and cross-sells to motivate customers to qualify for free shipping.

It’s a well-known fact that free shipping is a powerful motivator for customers. And, an equally well-known fact that the absence of free shipping can cause potential customers to shop elsewhere.

Promotions and cross-selling are both effective strategies to encourage customers to purchase more merchandise in order to reach a free shipping threshold. And best of all, the retailer has complete control of the promotion parameters, ensuring that they can be used to the greatest advantage.

Formulating a free shipping strategy

But the key question for many businesses is how to use free shipping promotions as an incentive to boost conversions without chipping away at all-important margins.

Offering free shipping on orders that exceed a certain amount can be a smart strategy. One common method is to set the free shipping purchase amount threshold slightly above the average purchase amount. Once the magic number has been identified, it’s simply a matter of creating the promotion.

Promotion made easy

Product Management Page Screenshot

 

And this is where many online retailers encounter difficulties. Their commerce platforms may not allow for the creation of promotions, may offer only limited options, and may involve a complex and time-consuming promotion creation process.

With the Apache OFBiz Accelerator promotion engine, users can create multiple and varied promotions quickly and easily. It offers many creative features that empower retailers to custom-configure promotions (total purchase amount, special offer, percentage off etc), along with in-cart features, and more.

Don’t forget cross-selling

It’s important to make it as intuitive as possible for customers to identify preferred merchandise that correlates to items already in the cart. The Apache OFBiz Accelerator delivers customizable cross-selling capabilities that augment the flexible promotion capabilities of the Apache OFBiz Accelerator promotion engine.

The Apache OFBiz Accelerator empowers online retailers to select multiple items to recommend as cross-sell items, making it easy for customers to access merchandise that suits their preferences. This, in turn, encourages customers to add more items to their carts in order to reach the free shipping threshold.

A winning combination

With a solid promotion strategy and multiple cross-selling options, online retailers will see a noticeable increase in the numbers of customers reaching the free shipping threshold.


DATE: Apr 05, 2016
AUTHOR: Anil Patel
OFBiz