u/PresidentEvil99

I went down a free-shipping rabbit hole and found two Shopify owners with almost opposite stories.

One said they'd been giving away six figures a year in free shipping.

They kept raising the threshold, then eventually said screw it and removed free shipping altogether.

According to them: no change in conversion rate. No change in AOV.

Just a bunch of shipping cost they apparently hadn't needed to eat.

Then, in the same discussion, another owner said they moved their free-shipping threshold from $100 to $150.

Their AOV went from $186 to $156 and abandonment shot up.

Same lever. Completely different customer reaction. Got me wondering...

Not really "what's the correct free-shipping threshold?" because not sure there's a useful universal answer to questions like that.

More like:

What are we giving customers because we've decided they expect it... without really knowing if they do?

• Free shipping.
• 10% welcome discounts.
• Constant sales.
• Free returns.
• Gifts with purchase.

Maybe even some of the apps/features we've convinced ourselves are helping conversion.

Has anyone here actually removed one of those "customers expect this" things and been surprised by what happened?

Either direction.

Something weren't sure you should remove but nobody cared...

or something that looked completely optional until you took it away and customers immediately proved otherwise.

Would love actual before/after stories if anyone has one.

Saw a line this week from Paul Warren that I haven't been able to shake:

“Revenue is the goal. Conversion rate is a metric. Most founders set targets on the metric.”

His nightmare version was even better: a quarter where every number you tracked improved and the bank account did not.

I keep noticing the ad-account version of this with the ecom store owners i work with / talk to.

Meta says the campaign had a great month. ROAS is up. CPA is down. The dashboard is green.

Then you look at what actually happened in the store and somehow the story isn't nearly as exciting.

Sometimes there's a perfectly boring explanation. Attribution window, duplicate events, returning customers getting credited somewhere weird, whatever.

But IMO the interesting moment is before you know the explanation:

two numbers you expected to move together... didn't.

When's the last time that happened in your business?

Not necessarily ads. A metric looked great, but the money disagreed.

What were the two numbers, and what eventually tipped you off?

Not because they had some giant enterprise account.

I mean you sold them one account, then realized they were an agency / consultant / implementation company / whatever and kept bringing your software into their own clients.

Curious about cases where this happened before you intentionally had a partner/reseller program.

What kind of client were they, what did they use your product for, and when did you realize “oh shit, this isn't really one customer”?

To the course creators - have you ever noticed your best customers tend to show up right after something specific happens?

Not “they saw my Instagram post” or “they joined my email list.”

I mean in their actual life/business.

They got promoted. Bought something expensive. Started a business. Got a new client. Adopted a dog. Changed jobs. Took on a new responsibility. Whatever.

Basically some event happened that suddenly made learning your thing way more important than it was a month earlier.

Curious if anyone here has noticed a pattern like that with their students.

What's the course + what tends to be happening in someone's world right before they buy?

Been noticing something with people who do client work.

Someone will tell you:

“Everything we do is custom.”

Then you ask what they actually did for their last 10 customers and... 70% of it was basically the same thing 😂

Same type of customer comes in with the same expensive problem.

You install roughly the same system/process.

You've already learned all the annoying edge cases.

They pay roughly the same amount.

They're trying to get roughly the same result.

At some point it becomes less “custom work” and more "productized offer no one named yet."

I'm curious who here has accidentally ended up with one of these.

Not something you think you could productize.

Something you've already sold/delivered enough times that you basically know:

this is who buys it / this is what we do / this is roughly what it costs / this is what they're trying to fix.

What's yours + how many times have you actually delivered roughly the same thing?

Not necessarily your biggest or current offer.

I'm curious about the weird evergreen stuff.

Maybe it's a course you made 5 years ago. An old workshop. Templates. A certification. Training library. Whatever.

Something you barely promote anymore but every once in a while Stripe still goes ding 😂

What is it / how old is it / who still buys it / where are those buyers finding it?

And the part I'm probably most curious about:

why did you stop actively pushing it if people still buy?