A free-shipping offer that nobody can see does nothing. At LS Advisory we review small storefronts every week, and one of the most common gaps is a shop that offers free shipping over some amount but never states it anywhere a shopper reads before checkout. The threshold sits in the shipping settings, invisible, doing no work.
This guide covers why a stated threshold raises average order value, how to choose the number for your store, and the exact steps to put it in an announcement bar on both Shopify and WooCommerce. You can act on all of it today without spending anything.
Two things move when you publish a free-shipping threshold. First, unexpected shipping cost is a common reason carts get abandoned. A clear message at the top of every page tells a shopper, before they invest any effort, that there is a way to avoid that cost. That reduces the surprise at checkout that sends people away.
Second, and more useful for revenue, a stated number gives shoppers a goal. Someone a few dollars short of the threshold has a concrete reason to add one more item. That is the behavior that pushes average order value up. The math is straightforward: if the extra item carries good margin and only shipping is on the line, you often come out ahead even when you cover shipping on that order. The lift shows up across many orders, not on any single one.
The key word is stated. The threshold has to be visible early and repeated. A number buried in a footer policy page does none of this work.
Start from your own average order value, not from a competitor's banner. Pull your recent orders and find the average. A threshold set modestly above that average tends to work well: close enough that shoppers near the average will stretch for it, but high enough that you are not giving away shipping on orders that would have shipped paid anyway.
As an example, if your average order is forty dollars, a threshold around fifty dollars is a reasonable starting point. Round to a clean number. Avoid setting it so high that almost nobody reaches it, which just reads as a tax, and avoid setting it at or below your average, which gives the discount away without changing behavior.
Then check that the economics hold. Take your typical shipping cost and your gross margin on an average add-on item. If a shopper adding one item to clear the threshold still leaves you with positive contribution after shipping, the number is safe. Treat the first figure as a test, not a permanent decision. Watch average order value and shipping cost for a few weeks, then adjust. You can run this read yourself straight from your order export.
Most current Shopify themes built on the Online Store 2.0 framework, including Dawn and its relatives, ship with a built-in announcement bar, so you do not need an app for the basic version. Go to your admin, then Online Store, then Themes, and click Customize on your active theme. In the theme editor, look for an Announcement Bar section, usually grouped with or just above the Header. If it is not already enabled, add it from the section or block list.
Set the text to something plain and specific, for example: Free shipping on orders over fifty dollars. Link the bar to your main collection so a click takes shoppers to products. Give the bar a background color that contrasts with your header so it does not blend in. Keep it to one short line; the bar shows on mobile too, where space is tight.
The built-in bar is static text only. If you want a progress message that updates as the cart fills, such as how much more a shopper needs to add, that requires an app. Hextom and Quick Announcement Bar are commonly used and free to start. Add an app only once the static version is live and earning, not before.
WooCommerce has no announcement bar in core, so you add one of two ways. The quickest no-plugin route: open Appearance, then Customize, and look for a header notice area, or use your theme's own header-banner setting if it has one. Many block themes let you add a short banner through the Site Editor at the top of the header template. That is fine for a fixed line of text such as your threshold.
For anything beyond static text, a dedicated plugin is the cleaner path. Free options in the WordPress plugin directory include Free Shipping Bar for WooCommerce and Free Shipping Label and Progress Bar for WooCommerce. These read your actual WooCommerce free-shipping rule, show a bar in the header, and can display a live progress message as the cart total rises. After installing from wp-admin under Plugins, configure the bar's text, colors, and position on the plugin's settings page, and confirm it reads the same threshold you set under WooCommerce, then Settings, then Shipping. Keep one bar plugin only; stacking two is a frequent cause of the duplicate banners we see in reviews.
Wherever the bar lives, the number in it must match the number in your shipping settings exactly. A bar that says fifty dollars while checkout charges shipping until sixty erodes trust and creates support emails. Set the threshold in one place, state it in the bar, and verify by adding items to a test cart until shipping goes free.
Check the bar on a phone, since much of your traffic is mobile, and confirm the text does not get cut off. Then leave it alone for a few weeks and compare average order value before and after. Across the sixty-three Shopify and WooCommerce stores LS Advisory has audited, the most common gaps were missing email capture, about one in six stores, and missing or placeholder social links, about one in ten; the average storefront health score was eighty-five out of one hundred. One clear sentence about your shipping offer, placed where shoppers see it first, is usually the highest-return change a small store can make with what it already offers.
If you already offer free shipping over a threshold, the cheapest win available is simply saying so, in a contrasting bar at the top of every page, on the same number your checkout actually uses.
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