Recharge Loyalty rewards and benefits: Free or discounted shipping with Shopify Plus

Offering free or discounted shipping on member purchases is a popular membership program benefit and entices members to make additional purchases and increase conversion rates. 

This guide provides an overview of how the free or discounted shipping benefits works, how to create a discounted shipping benefit, and resources for your development team to add this benefit to your storefront.

Before you start

• This benefit is only available for stores with a Paid membership program. 
• This build requires knowledge of Shopify Scripts and basic Ruby which is not supported by Recharge as per the design and integration policy. If you require further assistance from a developer, visit the Recharge Agency Partner Directory.
• This build utilizes the Shopify Script Editor which is only available to Shopify Plus merchants. If your store is not on Shopify Plus, refer to Rewards and benefits: Free shipping.
• Discounted shipping rates will only apply to orders created at checkout. 
• This solution relies on the membership tags created by the Recharge membership program.

How it works

Free or discounted shipping benefits allows you to configure shipping benefits on a membership program. Select a membership program and add shipping benefits specific to each program. 

You can choose to offer the following benefits:

• Free shipping where you have the option to add a minimum order amount.
• Discounted shipping with a fixed or percentage amount. 
• Flat rate shipping fee. 

There are other settings you can configure: 

• You can exclude shipping rates over a certain dollar amount.
• Apply these benefits to subscription and one-time products, subscription products only, or one-time products only. 
  
  • If you choose the subscription products or one-time products option, a checkbox will appear to apply the shipping benefit to mixed carts.

Creating a discounted shipping benefit

1. Click Loyalty then select Paid memberships in your merchant portal. 
2. On the Membership programs page, click See details on the membership you want to add shipping benefits to.
   
3. In the benefits section, click Add new benefit.
4. Choose Free or discounted shipping (requires Shopify Plus) from the drop-down and select Next.
   
5. Fill in the benefit name and optionally add a description. Choose if you want to enable the benefit. 
6. Select a shipping discount type from the drop-down and optionally check the box to exclude shipping rates over a certain amount. 
   
7. Select the type of products the benefit applies to. If Subscription products or One-time products are selected, the Apply benefit to mixed carts checkbox will appear. Click Save to confirm your changes.
   

Discounted shipping product tagging

After configuring and enabling your discounted shipping benefit, shipping benefits are stored on eligible products as product tags in Shopify. The following table contains different discounted shipping scenarios and an example of their corresponding Shopify product tag:

Create a Shopify Shipping Script

To ensure your discounted shipping is applied at checkout, you must install a Shopify Script to automatically apply your shipping benefit during checkout. The benefit will be applied to members and customers who have the membership product in their cart. This can be customized based on which shipping rate(s) you’d like to set to free.

Refer to the steps outlined in Member shipping technical details to configure member shipping benefits. 

Test the free shipping functionality

As free or discounted shipping is custom functionality, it's important to test thoroughly to ensure it works as expected. Go through the checkout process as both a non-member and logged-in test member to ensure the free shipping rate is displayed and applied correctly.