I was considering writing a module allowing people to offer shipping rebates with carts over a certain quantity when it dawned on me that the functionality was already there.

Here’s how we create a “Free Shipping” offer for any Magento store. In our example we’ll say that any order over £40 qualifies for free shipping on any shipping method.

First we need to create a new Shopping Cart Price Rule. This is done by logging into your Magento Admin and navigating to Promotions » Shopping Cart Price Rules.

From here we hit the Add New Rule button.

This is the Rule Information screen where we provide some general options for the rule.

We need to provide a descriptive name, set it’s status to active and enable it for the customer groups we are interested in. We also have options to make it a coupon code, and set all of the coupon options that go with it, and a priority.

The priority is associated with the order in which the rules, which are coming up next, get applied.

This is the Conditions screen where we set the conditions for when this price rule should become active. As our rule is for free shipping on any orders over £40, I have created the rule ‘Subtotal equals or greater than £40.00′.

I’ve also demonstrated how you can make this rule only applicable to certain shipping methods by creating a rule ‘Shipping method is [flatrate] Fixed’. You could add as many shipping methods as you want here, or not place any shipping method rules to make the rule apply to all shipping methods.

Next it’s the Actions screen where we define what happens when the conditions are met. We are able to set actions such as percentage / fixed discounts off the entire order, etc, here. We aren’t interested in this however, so we’ll set the percentage discount to be 0% and we’ll look at the “Free shipping” option.

If we select “For matching items only” then the free shipping will only be applied to those items defined in the rules section below. The rule section defaults to allowing all products, so if we keep it that way then the free shipping will be applied to all products in the customer’s shopping basket.

All that needs to be done now is to hit the “Save Rule” button at the top left of the screen and the rule will be saved and, depending on the active dates you set on the Rule Information screen, should become active immediately.