Local Free Shipping Configuration

[Gary118]

It would be great to be able to setup a shipping profile that provides the ability to offer free shipping to a specified set of post code prefixes or within a specified radius of our retail unit.

[k_atie]

Hey @Gary118, welcome to Square's Seller Community, and thank you for flagging this to us!

At the moment, the ability to set up a shipping profile that offers free shipping for a specific radius or set of postcodes is considered a feature request. I can totally see why this feature would be useful for you and your business. I'll make sure to pass that over to our eCom specialist team for consideration as they are always looking for feedback on how we can improve our products. 

However, I did find some potential workarounds that could work for you. 

Free Shipping Discount Code

The first workaround would be creating a discount code that you could give to customers located within the radius to give them free shipping. 

To set up a discount code:

1. In your Square Online Overview page, go to Items > Coupons or Shared Settings > Coupons.
2. Select Add Coupon.

The main limitation of doing this is that the coupon is not actually tied to the shipping address. So technically, if you made a coupon code for free shipping, there would be nothing stopping a customer from applying that code to an order shipped outside of that radius. You could create a discount code on a case-by-case basis if your customers informed you of their address to mitigate this limitation.

Use In-House Delivery instead of Shipping

It is possible to set up free shipping when you set up in-house delivery. You can set up the radius or postal codes, make the delivery fee £0, and then choose to either deliver or ship those orders when they are placed. 

To set up a distance-based fee:

1. In your Square Online Overview page, go to Fulfilment > Pickup & Delivery.
2. Add your location if you haven’t already, or select Set up location or Edit by the location in question.
3. Edit the ‘Delivery settings’.
4. Under ‘Delivery area’, choose your Radius, distance, and units.
5. Under ‘Delivery fee’, choose Distance-based fees. The default minimum for ‘Delivery distance’ is set to 0, so be sure to enter the maximum. Then input a Fee for this delivery distance, and select the tick box for Free for orders over if you’d like to offer free delivery for orders over a certain amount.
6. Select +Add fee to enter a new delivery distance range, and repeat step #5. Be sure to create ranges that max out at the total delivery radius you entered in step #4.
7. Identify a ‘Fallback delivery fee’ to catch any deliveries that might fall outside of the rules you’ve set. This ensures a delivery fee is charged on those orders as well.
8. Select Continue to proceed and/or Save when finished.

The main limitation of using this method would be the verbiage used on your website. There’s not going to be a way to change and “delivery” verbiage shown to your customers. So you would need to be very clear elsewhere (homepage, popups, etc) to tell customers what this “delivery” option means. For example, you could have a popup that says “Live in the X area? Don’t choose shipping. Choose Local Delivery to get orders to your door free!”. 

Another thing to consider would be shipping labels. If you decide to ship manually you may have to create custom shipping labels as they will be marked as going out for delivery. 

I hope that the above information will be useful to you. Let me know if there's anything else you need!