It is 11pm. The store is quiet. You are staring at your Shopify dashboard, scrolling past the same numbers you saw yesterday, looking for the lever that moves them. You feel it is there. You just cannot see it.
It is. And it is hiding in plain sight: your free shipping threshold.
Most merchants pick that number the way you pick a password under pressure. Round it up, make it feel generous, move on. “Free shipping over $75.” Done. But that one number quietly decides how much every shopper spends with you. Set it wrong and you leave money on the table every single hour your store is open.
Start with the number you already have
Open your orders and find your modal cart value - the order total that shows up most often. Not the average. The most common. That is the price point your customers have already told you they are comfortable with.
Your free shipping threshold should sit roughly 15 to 30 percent above that number.
If most carts land around $50, a threshold near $60 to $65 gives shoppers a reason to add one more thing without asking them to double their order. The gap feels closeable. And a closeable gap is the whole game.
Why too high quietly bleeds you
Here is the trap. A threshold that feels ambitious - “free shipping over $150” when carts sit at $55 - does not inspire shoppers. It deflates them. The goal is so far away they stop trying. They check out at $55, or worse, they abandon the cart entirely because shipping feels like a penalty.
Set it too high and you do not raise your average order value. You raise your bounce rate.
The gap is where the work happens
A good threshold creates a small, honest distance between where a shopper is and where free shipping begins. “You are $12 away from free shipping” is one of the most persuasive sentences in ecommerce - but only when $12 is genuinely within reach.
That is the entire job: find the gap, then help shoppers close it with a product that actually fits their basket.
You do not have to guess this number. We built a free calculator that takes your real order data and hands you a threshold backed by math, not gut feel.
Find your number with the free shipping threshold calculator
Stop staring at the dashboard. The lever was always this one.