Should a new online store offer free shipping or charge flat rates?

The general rule of thumb is you want a free shipping threshold. Most stores starting out bake a little of the shipping cost into every product’s price. On a bigger order, delivery gets absorbed in the margin. On a small order, the customer chips in with a flat rate. It keeps launch simple, and it nudges basket size up.

My 80/20 setup for a new store is a couple of flat-rate zones, split by region only if delivery costs genuinely differ. Here in New Zealand that might be one price for the North Island and a higher one for the South. Then free shipping over a set order value. One catch: on the entry-level Shopify plans you can’t automatically detect rural addresses, so customers have to pick the rural rate themselves.

Start with your home market. Add other countries later, with a higher free shipping threshold for international orders. Express options and per-country rates can wait too.

Then run it for three to six months, maybe forever. Only tweak it once you’ve got real order data that says something needs to change.