Free Shipping Threshold

You set a shipping floor once. It was $50, back when a typical order was $40, and you have not moved it since.

Your average order is $60 now. Almost everything ships free, the floor nudges no one, and the line meant to build baskets is just a cost you absorb.

A free shipping threshold is the cart value a shopper has to clear before shipping stops being charged. It is one of the few levers that shifts average order value without touching price, which is why it belongs in unit economics rather than on the promo calendar.

In the corpus, the threshold rides inside the ad

Most writing on shipping thresholds treats it as a checkout setting - a progress bar in the cart. In the teardown data it lives somewhere else: inside the creative.

Graza runs “Michelin quality for $16. Free shipping on $55+” as a standing offer line in its Google ads. The threshold is not waiting on the cart page. It is the number in the ad.

Little Sleepies runs a lower floor, $25, and surfaces it constantly. On Google, “Free Shipping On Most Orders” carries 19 ads and “100% Off Shipping - US Only” another 10, per its Google teardown.

What stands out is durability. Across Little Sleepies’ Meta account, “free shipping” appears 48 times against 27+ on Google - the one offer that survives both platforms.

Discount language does not travel the same way. Only 1.7% of the brand’s Meta card bodies mention a sale or a percentage off. Free shipping shows up in 4.6%, nearly three times as often.

The 30%-above-AOV rule, and a test that ignored it

Every vendor guide lands on the same formula: set the threshold 15-30% above your current AOV, high enough to build a basket and low enough that shoppers still qualify, per the standard playbook.

That formula is a starting point. One documented test lands nowhere near it.

A sports-equipment brand with a $650 AOV had free shipping set at $100, which meant more than 85% of orders already shipped free. The floor was doing nothing.

Testing that $100 floor against a $500 one lifted revenue per visitor by 12%, in an Intelligems A/B test. The winning number sat five times above what the 30% rule would have produced, because the rule assumes a threshold near AOV and this account’s was nowhere close.

Where the threshold quietly stops earning

Two failure modes recur, and neither appears in a platform help doc.

The first is drift. A floor set against last year’s AOV decays as the average order climbs past it, until nearly every order clears it and the incentive is spent. That is the opening scenario, and the reason it is worth a recurring review rather than a one-time decision.

The second is margin. Set the floor too low and small orders ship free at a loss on contribution margin; set it too high and the shopper who cannot reach it walks. Unexpected costs at checkout remain the most-cited reason shoppers abandon, at 48% of them, per 2026 cart data.