Creating a free shipping coupon or promotion in Magento is a bit different from enabling free shipping throughout your entire store because you can set start dates, end dates and limit usage in a more extensive way. With the free shipping method, you can only set minimum order values.
In the video below, I cover how it all works in detail.
Can’t view the video? Watch it on YouTube
For starters, I strongly recommend that you disable free shipping in “System > Configuration > Sales > Shipping Methods”. Because enabling free shipping defeats the purpose of creating a promotion or offering a coupon code.
I am mentioning this because I’ve read somewhere that this should be done, but it actually defeats the purpose of a promotion because that would just offer free shipping throughout the entire store — and it will override your promotion or coupon code.
After verifying that the free shipping method is disabled, go to “Promotions > Shopping Cart Rules”.
Once on this page, you’ll want to click the “Add New Rule” button.
Then simply give your rule a name. This name can be anything that you’d like it to be and it’s there for your records. Same goes for the description.
Status should be set to active if you want to run the current rule upon saving the form.
For ‘websites’, you’ll want to select the website(s) that you wish to run the promotion on. If you only have a main website, you’d want to select that one.
As for customer groups, you’ll want to select the customer groups that you’d like to offer the promotion or coupon code to. If you’d like to offer it to everyone, simply select all of the customer groups.
As for the ‘Coupon’ field, if you select the ‘no coupon’ option, this will run as a storewide promotion and everyone will be able to get in on it. If you select ‘specific coupon’, only customers that enter a coupon code will qualify for the promotion.
If you’ve selected the ‘specific coupon’ option, you will need to enter a coupon code in the ‘coupon code’ field — which can be anything. In the video, I enter ‘Free Shipping’ in the field.
If you’ve selected the ‘specific coupon’ option, you also have the option of entering a number in the ‘uses per coupon’ field — which limits the amount of times that this coupon can be used.
If you’d like to limit uses per customer, enter a number in the ‘Uses per Customer’ field.
In the ‘from date’ field, enter the date that you would like this promotion to start on.
In the ‘to date’ field, enter the date that this promotion will end on.
If you leave the above date fields empty, the promotion will run for as long as the ‘status’ is set to active.
As for ‘priority’, this is the sort order of this promotion. So if you have created multiple promotions, you can specify how these promotions are displayed on the shopping cart rules page in your admin panel.
For ‘Public in RSS Feed’, you would select “Yes” only if you want this promotion displayed in your RSS feed. So if you want this promotion to be a bit more hush, hush, you would select “No”.
Next you can set conditions, by clicking the ‘conditions’ link in the left column.
Conditions basically set limitation on you promotion. This is actually pretty cool because you can, for example, limit the promotion to a specific attribute, country, payment method, shipping method and more.
You can even set multiple conditions which makes these rules even more powerful. For example, you can run a promotion that only applies to a specific category and only allow customers located in specific country to get in on the promotion.
Note that you do not have to enter conditions. If you leave everything as is, you will simply create a promotion or coupon code that works on any purchase.
Next you can click on the ‘actions’ link in the left column.
Here you will need to make sure that “Yes” is selected for ‘free shipping’ — every other field can be left as is or can be modified based on your preference.
Now click the ‘labels’ link in the left column.
Here you can enter a default label or language specific label. The text that you enter here, will be seen by customers so you will want to enter a value that makes sense.
When done, click the ‘Save’ button and be sure to test the promotion in your cart.