Shopping cart: Free Shipping
Hypothesis
If we prominently display free shipping eligibility and thresholds, then progression to checkout and sales will improve because shipping costs are a top driver of cart abandonment.
Test Results
Key Learning
Problem: How prices are displayed on the shopping cart directly influences perceived value and willingness to buy.
What worked: Free shipping messaging and visual prominence significantly impacts cart progression to checkout and sales. Shipping costs remain one of the top reasons for cart abandonment; making free shipping obvious is one of the highest-ROI cart optimizations. Validated across 6 related tests. (+8.5% lift)
Takeaway: A meaningful improvement that compounds with other optimizations. Pricing perception changes are high-leverage — consider testing anchor pricing, tier order, and billing defaults as follow-ups.
How to Apply This to Your Site
This experiment demonstrated that shopping cart: free shipping can produce a +8.5% improvement in conversions. The test was run on a cart page in the e-commerce industry. With 3,123 visitors in the sample, this is a robust result.
Before you test: Consider that pricing tests typically require adequate traffic to reach statistical significance. Run your test for at least 2 full business cycles to account for weekly traffic patterns.
What Was Tested
In this experiment, customers were eligible for free shipping (with cart amounts of $39 or more) were presented with an earned free shipping message. The variation also showed the value of the earned free shipping - (for example $10). Impact on progression to checkout and sales was measured.
Methodology
Build On These Learnings
Save your own experiments, spot winning patterns across your test history, and stop repeating what's already been tried.
Related Experiments
Pricing Page: Least Or Most Expensive First
Problem: How prices are displayed on the pricing page directly influences perceived value and willingness to buy.
Pricing Page: More Or Fewer Plans
Problem: How prices are displayed on the pricing page directly influences perceived value and willingness to buy.
Product: More Or Fewer Plans on Product Page
Context: How prices are displayed on the product directly influences perceived value and willingness to buy.
Signup: Payment First
Context: Friction during the signup process causes users to abandon right when they're closest to converting.