In 2025, customer preferences and business models play significant roles in driving who offers free shipping and who does not. Across the most successful online retailers in North America, however, the option still remains broadly popular.
In Digital Commerce 360’s new Ecommerce Fulfillment Report, the latest findings show that 71.2% of retailers in the Top 1000 Database offered free shipping as of 2024. The database ranks North America’s largest online retailers by annual web sales. That share is up slightly from 71.0% in 2023.
Importantly, the new edition of the annual fulfillment report also highlights the merchandise categories where free shipping is most common, as well as how important online shoppers said free shipping and other options were to them when placing orders.
Who offers free shipping among major online retailers?
By merchandise category, the retailers who are most likely to offer free shipping were in Jewelry (90.2% of whom offered some form of free shipping) and Health & Beauty (84.5%). Those relatively high rates of participation make sense in areas where low-weight products often sell for high prices, helping the economics of free shipping to make business sense.
Notably, the least common merchandise categories for free shipping were Flowers & Gifts (52.4%) and Mass Merchants (57.7%). In the first, timeliness and freshness of the product can be as important as the product selection itself, placing successful, fast fulfillment at a premium. In the meantime, Mass Merchants tend to carry a wide range of goods by price range and merchandise classification.
For Mass Merchants specifically, that spectrum of inventory and order types can necessitate additional requirements. However, leading Mass Merchants, such as Amazon, Walmart and Target, have all found ways to leverage the value of free shipping in their respective paid membership programs. In that context, free shipping not only adds value to lines of business; it can help them to cultivate loyalty and amass valuable first-party customer data.
Do online shoppers care about free shipping?
In Amazon’s case, its use of the Prime membership program to bundle in fulfillment services has a ripple effect that has helped to raise shopper expectations. The 2025 Ecommerce Fulfillment report also shares October survey results. It features responses from 1,057 online shoppers who were contacted by Bizrate Insights and Digital Commerce 360.
Asked which shipping and delivery options mattered most when deciding where to make purchases, 73.9% of respondents selected free shipping. It was the most cited answer on the survey, with speed of delivery (58.9%) at No. 2.
At the end of the day, retailers have a host of options at their disposal for responding to these expectations. The new report offers glimpses into those efforts as well. Examples include last-mile delivery services such as DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats, as well as warehouse-level technologies that are shrinking travel times from fulfillment centers to customers’ front doors.
What’s clear is that cost and speed carry currency with consumers, and achieving the right mix can impact conversion.
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