I have been sounding the alarm that the cost of free shipping is going to cut deep into retailers margins as we enter the Back to School selling season and beyond. In the face of looming FedEx and UPS fuel surges, uh fuel surcharges, a new site built completely around free shipping has hit the scene.
In December, 2007, FreeShipping.org was co-founded by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Luke and Maisie Knowles. The premise of the site is to offer in one spot only online free-shipping offers from their retail store partners. The look and feel of the site is like other coupon sites and has the feel of an affiliate program in reverse. The website states, “It is a site with one simple goal, to save online shoppers money by providing them with a list of trusted online retailers who are offering free shipping coupons.”
According to their media kit, “Online shoppers and retailers alike have found FreeShipping.org beneficial. Traffic on the site has doubled every month since it debuted last December. The sales FreeShipping.org has generated for the brands on its site have doubled every month, too. In May, FreeShipping.org helped create more than $250,000 in sales. Knowles expects to have more than 1,000 retailers offering free shipping deals on the site by year’s end.” At this time they publicly claim 700 retailers with a presence on freeshipping.org.
If my calculations are correct, that’s an average sales total of $357.14 per retailer during May. Wow! I am going out on a limb and guess that not every one of the 700 retailers got a sale. I’ll let you decide if that’s worth the effort.
Still, to the Knowles’ credit, they have a used social media (a blog) to discuss various retail partner’s free shipping offers, online websites, some brands and more to attract online customers via internet searches. http://www.freeshipping.org/blog/ . I Googled “Macys free shipping, expecting to find a return for freeshipping.org somewhere on page fortygazillion, but lo and behold, they checked in on page 1, # 1, better than the other 3,190,000 results. In contrast, I did a search for another online retailer, Coastal Contacts. They checked in on page 3, #10. Not so hot. But I’ll give the Knowles a score of 7 for doing some things right, having the guts to compete with fatwallet.com, UPromise’s “free shipping” category and all the other coupon portals that populate every mom’s browser bookmarks.
