Hi,

I have a website with Free Shipping set up for orders over £100, and this is generally working fine. We have a few products which are priced with shipping included, and therefore are marked 'shipping exempt'.

Recently we had an order where a customer ordered several items, £102 total value. One of the products was a shipping exempt one, value £6. Shipping was charged on the order, so it looks like the shipping exempt item did not contribute to the order total for the free shipping. I have tested again and this seems to be the case.

Is this correct? The customer expected to get free shipping as they had ordered over £100. I had a look at the includes parameters but didn't see anything related.

Thank you
Ellen

Hi Ellen, I think you may be right, and Vince could likely confirm, but perhaps (as a work around) you might try setting the weight of the item to zero instead of marking it shipping exempt and run a test order to see what result you get. Maybe that would work.

David

Hi Ellen
I tried here and the discount seemed to work as expected. I tried two items, each for $55 and a Free Shipping Discount set at $100 and one of the items set to Shipping Exempt. With both these items in the cart I get a Free Shipping discount as I expected. As the limit is near £100, could it be that VAT is involved in some way? That is, the actual cost of the items is below £100 but with VAT added it looks like they are above?

Vince

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Thanks Vince & Dave for the replies. VAT is not the reason, as the prices I quoted were all +VAT (so the order total inc VAT was higher). However, on closer inspection I could have described my setup better, sorry!

I am not using a Free Shipping discount. I am using Price Based Shipping, with the postal zone set up so that up to £99.99 has a shipping cost, £100 and over has zero cost. See screenshot:

https://imgur.com/a/O3d8ENG

I tried to embed directly with tags but that didn't work, how do you add an image to forum post?


If you would like to look on the live site this is one of the shipping exempt products, [link removed]
All the other products except the samples do have shipping.

Many thanks
Ellen

Hi Ellen
In that case then I think this is working as expected. By making the product shipping exempt you are saying that it doesn't count towards shipping. In your case if the product had counted towards shipping it would have pushed things over the £100 free shipping limit but the cart doesn't know that. It could just as well have been that if the product had not been shipping exempt it could have pushed shipping into a higher band.
Maybe the idea would be to actually use a Free Shipping discount and set it to £100? That way also the discount is advertised on the site and encourages customers to buy a bit more.

Vince

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Hi Vince,

Good point, thank you. I will experiment with the Free Shipping discount instead. Our shipping is a single price for orders under £100 (+VAT), or free over £100. Would I change to weight based shipping or leave as price based do you think?

Thanks for your help
Ellen

Hi Ellen, if the free shipping discount is based on price, then you want to stay with price based shipping I believe.

Thanks,
David