How can I offer multiple free shipping options for a single country in Square Online?

[AnnaBYLY]

Using square online I was able to set up multiple shipping profiles that all shipped to the UK. 

I have a default one that charges for standard postage under one amount, and gives free post over it. 

I also have a profile applied to specific heavy items, which charges a higher amount for a courier. 

I used to also have a free post option for some lightweight items that don’t cost me much to send. This was deleted for a while while these items were out of stock. But now I want to redo it and can’t because with fulfilment in a new part of the system it says I can’t have an another shipping profile to the UK. 

Is there another way to give free postage just on a couple of specific items? 

[Laurie_ · Accepted solution]

Good question, @AnnaBYLY!

Since you can only assign one shipping profile per country in Square Online, and you want to offer free shipping based on multiple conditions (such as weight and order total), a quick and easy way to provide free shipping on selected products—without needing to create a new shipping profile—is by using discounts or coupons.

Here’s how the options differ:

1. Free Shipping Coupon

A coupon for free shipping will apply to an entire order, so it may not be the best option for your use case, especially if a customer selects additional items outside the select few you've mentioned. This option generally works best when you are wanting to limit the offer to sales over a certain amount, and doesn't yet offer the customisation options needed for weight-based free shipping.

2. Automatic Discount

Automatic discounts apply directly to specific items or categories without needing the customer to enter a code. The key benefit here is that they can be applied automatically at checkout based on the criteria you set. For example, if you want to offer free shipping for specific items, you can apply an automatic monetary discount equivalent to your standard shipping cost (e.g., £5 or £10 off). This discount would only apply to the qualifying products or categories.

One important note is that automatic discounts are limited to either a percentage off or a set pound amount, so you’ll need to set it to the value of your standard shipping cost. You can also restrict this discount to online sales only, preventing it from applying to in-person transactions.

It's always a good idea to test both options to see which one works best for your needs. I hope this helps! 🙂

[AnnaBYLY]

Thanks, that’s what I thought but wanted to check. The automatic discount will work for this particular thing, but it’s not ideal as people don’t always read things properly and may still see postage and be put off. 

Interestingly, my 2 pre-existing profiles, both for the UK have both carried over, but I can’t make any changes at all to them. They seem to be active anyway, so I’m going to just leave it alone unless I absolutely have to - but if I have to make a change in future, what other options would I have for the heavy items? I don’t really want the main profile to be weight based instead of cost based, because we only have about 5 heavy items to think about, and it’s more to do with them also being BIG as well as heavy. 

Can I feedback that I don’t like this change, my previous website allowed us to have multiple different delivery options to the same country - so people could choose the free Royal Mail shipping option, or they could choose to pay for a next courier delivery - I can’t see a way to handle this if we can only have one profile per country?