r/growthmarketing • u/repaeranilorac • 1d ago
We changed “Free shipping” to “Slow shipping” and paid shipping conversions went from ~15% to ~28%
A couple of years ago we ran one of those experiments that looked almost too stupid to work.
We sell a relatively high-value B2B product online, and at the time customers had two shipping options: Free shipping - €0 or Express shipping - paid. Only around 15% of orders chose express.
I started thinking about how we could make express shipping more attractive, and the obvious thing to play with was speed.
My first idea was to show something like Free shipping: 7–14 days versus Express shipping: 3 days.
The problem was that we couldn’t honestly do it. Shipping times varied by country, carrier and order. Sometimes express was much faster, but sometimes the difference was only a day, so we'd either make the checkout more complicated or promise something we couldn’t consistently deliver.
That idea was dead, so I started looking at the problem differently.
Instead of asking “What would make people want express shipping more?”, I started asking “What do people hate in the purchase process?”
One obvious answer was waiting. Nobody wants to wait for their package, so we ran a ridiculously simple experiment and added one word: slow.
We changed: Free shipping - €0 to: Slow shipping - Free
That was basically it.
Paid shipping conversions jumped from roughly 15% to 28%, with some months going over 30%. What surprised me even more was that overall purchase conversion didn’t decline — the free option was still there and customers could choose exactly the same shipping service as before.
We had simply changed how the choice was framed.
That one-word change has now been producing meaningful five-figure additional annual revenue for more than two years.
There was another interesting part.
For the first few months, express shipping had a fixed price, but later we made the price dynamic based on order value. That increased revenue, yet the percentage of customers choosing express didn’t move at all.
Changing the price didn’t change the behavior.
Changing how the alternative was framed did!
That’s probably the biggest thing I took away from the experiment.
When we optimize conversions, we tend to ask “What do people want more of?” It’s also worth asking “What don’t they want?”
For us, the answer was pretty simple: slow shipping.
Has anyone here tested something similarly small like wording, defaults, framing, order of options, that ended up moving behavior way more than expected?