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Icon credits: Ozza Okuonghae and Sergey Demushkin

You Can Now Offer Free Shipping in Your Shipping Policies

Take the opportunity to stand out among sellers on Discogs and delight your buyers by using the Free Shipping option now available as a shipping method in your Shipping Policies. 

As with all other shipping methods, you can choose which countries to offer free shipping to and what the minimum order subtotal needs to be for free shipping to apply. For example, being based in the Netherlands, if I wanted to offer free shipping to domestic buyers for orders over €100.00 it would look like this:

Screenshot of a Discogs seller dashboard showing free shipping options for domestic buyers in the Netherlands

Free Shipping can also be used in conjunction with your existing shipping policies, just add it as a new method. You can also add a Free Shipping method per region – if you want to set your minimum order for free shipping at a slightly higher rate for orders within Europe, just add another method for that region.

How Free Shipping Looks to Buyers

If the price of the item is higher than the minimum amount you’ve set for free shipping to be applied, the item price with shipping will be displayed to the buyer as below. You can see in the price column you have the price of the item no extra shipping.

Screenshot of the free shipping message next to items listed in the Discogs Marketplace

If you’re offering free shipping in your Shipping Policies, we recommend also adding a note in your Seller Terms to spell it out for buyers – be as clear as possible if free shipping only applies to a specific region (e.g. Free shipping on orders over €100.00 in The Netherlands).

Why Offer Free Shipping?

I’m stating the obvious here, I’m sure, but free shipping is a big draw for buyers. If you offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount, it could encourage buyers to add a few extra items to their order to avoid shipping costs.

While we’re still gathering data on the difference it makes to sellers on Discogs specifically, but there are plenty of industry-wide e-commerce stats available:

  • 77% of consumers say that free shipping is the biggest incentive to buy online.
  • Orders with free shipping have around 30% higher value.
  • Shipping costs are one of the major reasons that buyers abandon an order.
  • In a 2017 Statista survey on digital shopping trends in the US, 48% of respondents said they’d added extra items to their order to qualify free shipping.

We’ll keep you posted on how these numbers stack up against our own marketplace data as soon as we have enough data to draw significant insights.

More Shipping Policy Improvements To Come

This is the first of a number of improvements we’ll be making to Shipping Policies over the coming months to make them more effective and efficient for sellers, and to display them more prominently to attract more buyers to your listings. These improvements are based on feedback and conversations with sellers and buyers, user experience testing, workarounds we’ve seen in Shipping Policies, and general e-commerce research. Stay tuned for more developments like this one coming soon.

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