Offering free shipping at the product level

I really wish I could offer free shipping at the product level. I see two ways to offer free shipping and both ways don't work for me.

1) Offer it in the UPS configuration. This is a global setting and will give free shipping to all orders over a certain dollar amount. Won't work.

2) Offer a coupon code for free shipping (what I've done in the mean time until a better solution is found). Using this method I technically can set which products to get free shipping, however someone can order 100 items that aren't on the free shipping list and as long as they put just 1 free shipping item into their basket it makes the whole order free shipping.

Sure I put text on the website for which products can be used for free shipping but as we all know people don't pay attention to that and they put the code in anyway. In just one day of using this method I've already had to deal with a bunch of people who didn't understand which products they could use the coupon with. So this obviously isn't a solution.

What would fix all this would be a message in the checkout page that told people this coupon couldn't be applied because the wrong types of products were ordered.

Anyone have any thoughts or experiences with this?




Edited by BigOrder - 16-April-2009 at 5:03pm

Thank you for the reply.

I don't think this will work though because if they only order a couple of these products it will be under our Free Shipping minimum price of $35.00. If thats the case we want to charge them shipping on these products.

OK, here is exactly my situation and what's on my wish list:

We sell soap, shampoo, etc that come in hotel, travel sizes.

We sell a 5-pack of soap for $8.95
a 10-pack of shampoo for $10.95
Things like that. We want to offer these products with Free Shipping if the customers order $35.00 or more worth of these products. These are at retail prices so we still make a profit.

Now we also sell these exact same products to hotels, but they come in cases of 50 units. These prices are already deeply discounted because of the quantity, so we don't want to offer Free Shipping.

So my website caters to both retail consumers and the hospitality industry. However, I don't want to have people log in as wholesale or retail because 1) this turns off some clients. 2) It's ok and encouraged for people to order from either type. Sometimes a hospitality client will order a bunch of cases and get a few 5-packs so sample them.

The way ProductCart works now someone can order lots of cases of product (no free shipping) and just add one single 5-pack ( a free shipping product) to the cart and Free Shipping is applied to the whole order when they put in the coupon code.

What I would like is for ProductCart to not allow the coupon code to be used if it sees products in the cart that are not in the list of products for that Free Shipping coupon. When I made the coupon I had to choose which products it applies to, so that part is already there. But the coupon doesn't cancel out if other products are added.

So to sum this up, you have it correct when you said "when they order more than $35 worth of those products"  But if any other products are ordered don't give free shipping to the whole order. Give it to just those products or simply don't allow it at all.

Edited by BigOrder - 20-April-2009 at 12:59pm

In ProductCart v4 you will have more control on Discount Codes, including and excluding products.

For now, you could use the "No Shipping Charge" feature at the product level. However, please note that the feature basically makes the product a non-shipping product, versus a free shipping product. That means that if that's the only product in the shopping cart, the shipping step will be skipped. If there are other products in the cart, shipping will be calculated for those products only.

Thank you earlyimp for updating me with this info. This change will make a huge impact on my online store for the better.