Free Shipping Only From a Landing Page

A store-wide free shipping threshold tells every shopper the same thing, including the ones who would have paid for shipping. A campaign is different. You emailed a segment, a creator mentioned you, or you bought traffic for one product, and you want to reward exactly those visitors and nobody else. Free shipping only from a landing page does that: the offer lives behind one page, and a visitor who arrives anywhere else sees your normal rates. This page covers when that beats a threshold, how Shopify's shareable discount links carry an offer into the cart, what the app template does, where the offer leaks, and what you need to set up. Where Shopify's help pages say nothing, we say so instead of guessing.

When campaign-only shipping beats a threshold

A threshold is the right default: it applies to everyone, it nudges the cart up, and free shipping threshold explains how to set it. Campaign-only shipping earns its place in three situations.

1. The audience is known. A launch email to past buyers, where free shipping is the incentive to come back, does not need to be offered to a cold visitor browsing the same product.
2. The cost has to be capped. You can fund a campaign offer from the campaign's budget instead of from every order the store takes. If the offer is only reachable from one page, the number of orders that can use it is bounded by the traffic you send there.
3. You want to learn something. An offer with a single entry point makes a clean comparison against your normal store traffic, which promotion attribution builds on.

It is the wrong tool when the audience is everyone. Then a threshold is simpler and has no page to maintain.

How a link carries the offer into the cart

Shopify's Help Center describes shareable discount links and QR codes. The steps in its article: create and save a discount code for the products or collections you want to link to, make sure it is active, and then use Promote in the Discounts area to get a shareable discount code and choose the page the link opens. Shopify says a customer who opens the link gets a discount that "applies automatically to your customer's next checkout cart, or to any active carts they have open."

Several details in that article matter for a shipping offer:

• The destination can be changed. The link can open the store's home page, a collection or a product page. Replacing /discount/code with /discount/code?redirect=/new-path sends the visitor to the page you name, such as a campaign landing page.
• One discount per link. Shopify says a shareable link or QR code can have only a single discount applied to it, and that if several discounts apply to the same product, the most recent one applies to shareable links.
• Combinations follow your rules. A discount from a link combines with discounts already in the cart only when your combination settings allow it, and the limit of five discount codes per order still applies.
• Tracking is optional. You can pick an existing marketing campaign, and Shopify adds its UTM identifier and source to the link so you can follow the discount in campaign reports.

The article describes links for a discount code that features products or collections. It does not say whether a free shipping code is a supported kind of discount for a shareable link, so test it with your own store before you print a QR code.

What the template does

The app's template index describes the Landing page shipping template in one line: "Free shipping only for shoppers from a landing page." The template needs a developer to set up the storefront side, and that requirement is printed with the call to action below, not written here. We do not describe any behavior beyond the one line, and you should read the setup notes in the app before you promise a start date.

What you configure on the Shopify side is the shipping discount itself. Shopify's article on free shipping discounts lists the settings a free shipping discount offers:

• Countries: all countries or specific ones.
• Minimum requirements: a minimum purchase amount or a minimum quantity of items.
• Exclude shipping rates over a certain amount: an amount above which a rate is not made free. Shopify says this affects only shipping rates, not order totals.
• Customer eligibility: all customers, specific customers, customer segments or markets.
• Usage limits (discount codes only): a total number of uses, or one per customer.
• Combinations: which classes of discount it can combine with.

Two of these protect a campaign. The excluded rate amount keeps a heavy parcel from being shipped free on your dime, and a minimum purchase keeps tiny orders from costing more to ship than they bring in. Use shipping cost margin to find the number that makes sense for your products.

Where it leaks

A landing-page-only offer is only as private as the link. These are the leaks, in the order they usually happen.

1. Forwarded links. Shopify's article describes no way to limit a link to named recipients. Anyone who receives the URL, by forwarding, a screenshot of a QR code or a coupon site, can open it, and the discount applies to their cart.
2. Shared codes. If the offer rides on a discount code, the code can be typed in by anyone who learns it. The usage limits Shopify lists, a total cap and one per customer, bound the damage but do not stop the sharing. Unique discount codes covers one code per recipient, and campaign discount codes covers a code tied to a campaign link instead of to a page.
3. Stale links. An old link keeps working while its discount is active. Put an end date on the discount, and switch it off when the campaign ends.
4. Active carts. Because the discount applies to carts a shopper already has open, a visitor can add products first and open the link afterward. Plan for orders that did not start at the landing page.

Shopify's article describes what its links do, not how to limit their audience, so the controls above come from the discount settings and from your own end date.

A cap sets your worst case. Assume the campaign is allowed 500 uses in total, the typical parcel costs you 8 dollars to ship, and every use is a leaked one. The shipping you absorb is 500 times 8, or 4,000 dollars. The cap and the end date are what keep that number from being larger. All figures here are assumptions for the arithmetic.

Reading the result

Judge the campaign on profit per order and incremental orders, not on how many orders used the offer. Orders that came through the page are only part of the story if the link spread. The simplest honest comparison is the campaign's orders against the same weeks without it, as promotion attribution explains, and the shipping you paid goes on the cost side of the ledger.

Building landing page shipping

Open the Landing page shipping template in the app and read its setup notes with your developer before the campaign date. Create the free shipping discount first with a country list, a minimum purchase, an excluded rate amount and an end date, and then test the full path: open the link in a private window, add a product, and check that the shipping line shows free only on that path. Try the same cart without the link to confirm it does not.