Setting up free shipping options for your customers is very easy with Mintox, and it can be setup several different ways depending on your requirements. The free shipping options can appear either when the customer spends over a certain amount, purchases a certain quantity of items, or when all their products are marked as free shipping. You can even setup free shipping for specific membership groups.
The first step is to setup which orders qualify for free shipping. This step is very simple and involves editing individual products in the Mintox Products component to mark them as free shipping products, or going to the configuration page in the Mintox Shipping component to allow free shipping for orders over a certain value or containing a certain amount of products. Once a customer has added items to their cart and their cart qualifies for free shipping, any shipping methods that are set to allow free shipping will have no cost associated with them in the checkout.
The second step is to mark individual shipping methods to allow free shipping. Let's say you offered both standard and express shipping options, but you only want your free shipping offer to apply to standard shipping. This step is where you set your standard shipping options to allow the free shipping discount to be applied, and leave express shipping options as default which is to disallow the free shipping discount.
Setting which Orders Qualify for Free Shipping
There are 2 key areas where you setup which orders qualify for free shipping, the Product Details or the Shipping Configuration pages.
How do I setup free shipping on orders over a certain value, or with a certain amount of items in the cart?
Your first step is to access the Mintox Shipping component and click on the Configuration button. Near the bottom you'll find a section called "Customer Group Options".
In this section you'll see 1 row for each of your membership groups, including public. To get started, check the box next to each group that you wish to provide free shipping options to.
After clicking the checkboxes you'll see input boxes appear in the 2nd and 3rd columns on that row. Let's say you want to setup free shipping for orders of $100 or more, or orders that contain 10 or more items. To do so, you would enter 100 into the 2nd column and 10 into the 3rd column, however you don't need to enter a value into both fields.
How do I setup free shipping for specific products?
For each product that you want to setup free shipping on, simply go to the Mintox Products component and edit that product. Under the Shipping tab, check the Free Shipping box.
There are 2 possible results from this. Either your cart contains only products with the Free Shipping box checked, in which case the order will qualify for free shipping. However, if your cart contains products which are not all marked to allow free shipping, then the customer will still have to pay for shipping but the weight of the products marked as free shipping will not be considered when determining the shipping cost. This results in a lower cost when using shipping methods based on weight, but doesn't affect other shipping methods like flat rate.
Setting which Shipping Options are Allowed to be Free
By default, shipping methods are not allowed to be free, which means that even if an order qualifies for free shipping the customer will still have to pay for shipping in the checkout. When setting up free shipping you must set which shipping methods may be offered for free, this is so you can limit free shipping to standard shipping services, but allow express and other premium shipping options to be charged at the usual rate.
To allow free shipping to apply to a particular shipping method, you need to simply edit that shipping method in the Mintox Shipping component, check the Allow Method for Free Items box and click save. If you have multiple shipping methods for various regions or zones, repeat this step for all of them and you're done.