Free shipping is not free. Somebody pays, and if you copied it because everyone does, that somebody is your margin. Here is the math we ran. On low-ticket orders, absorbing shipping wiped out most of our profit while barely lifting conversion. So we set a threshold: free shipping over a certain cart value. Two things happened. Average order value rose as people added an item to qualify, and the orders that did ship free were now profitable enough to carry the cost. Conversion held. The lesson is not that free shipping is bad. It is that you have to know your numbers before you copy a tactic. Run the math on your own margins, then decide.