Testing two free-shipping thresholds on a classic Shopify theme
I manage a kitchenware store on a regular Shopify theme, nothing headless. We do about 60% of revenue in Q4 and I want to test a free-shipping banner at two thresholds, 49 and 75, before committing the margin for the season.
We already have Google Tag Manager on the store from our analytics setup.
My worry is the maintenance. If we pick a threshold and later want to change teh copy or the number, does that mean theme work every time? I have one developer day a month, roughly, so I need to know how much of this needs a dev
2 answers
For a Liquid theme the path is the JS SDK plus the Croct tag in the GTM container you already have, so the initial install does not even touch the theme code.
The developer part is a one-time job: create a slot for the banner and render its content in the theme where the banner lives. That is your one dev day.
After the banner slot exists, everything you described is dashboard work. The two thresholds become two variants in an A/B test, and when you want to change the copy or the number later, that is a content change you publish yourself. Marketers publish and pause without code, so your dev is out of the loop for the whole test-and-iterate cycle.
One dev day for the slot is doable. Good to know the threshold changes stay on my side after that.
Adding a data point since you are weighing the margin commitment: the ISZI free-shipping playbook is the same pattern you are describing, threshold nudge in a banner slot, and it produced +39% conversion for them. Obviously your numbers will differ, but it is a sane test to run before Q4.
One practical tip: make the conversion goal an order event rather than banner clicks, otherwise the higher threshold can look like it wins on engagement while losing on actual orders.