Here is a puzzle from Metorik's 2026 analysis of more than 65 million orders placed in 2025 on over 6,000 stores. Take the typical store and compare its free-shipping orders with its paid ones: $123 against $80. Free shipping looks like a clear win. Now pool every order and weight by volume: $96 for free shipping, $116 for paid. The result reverses.
Neither figure is a mistake. They answer two different questions, and only one of them is about your store.
The typical store: a threshold pulls baskets up
Most stores that offer free shipping put a minimum on it. A shopper with $62 in the cart and a $75 threshold has a reason to add one more item. The order that ships free is therefore larger than the ones that pay for postage, and the median store sees $123 against $80.
That gap is the whole argument for a threshold, and it is a real one. It is also a gap between two kinds of orders at the same store, not proof that the threshold created it. Some of those $123 baskets would have been that size anyway.
The whole market: free shipping also carries small orders
Pool all 65 million orders and the picture flips, because a few large stores ship a very high volume of small orders for free, with no minimum or a very low one. Those orders drag the weighted free-shipping average down to $96, while paid-shipping orders, which are rarer, sit at $116.
So "free shipping raises order value" is true where there is a threshold that shoppers have to reach, and false where free shipping is simply given away. The label on the shipping option does not do the work. The rule behind it does.
What a charged order costs
When a store does charge for shipping, Metorik puts the average charge at $9.27. That is a useful number, because it is roughly the price of the nudge. A shopper $9 short of the threshold is being asked to compare adding an item with paying for delivery.
If your threshold sits $40 above the typical basket, almost nobody is $9 short, and the offer is decoration. If it sits $5 above, nearly everyone qualifies and you have given away shipping without changing any basket.
Set your threshold from your own orders
Do not copy a competitor's number. Pull last quarter's orders and sort them by value, then follow three steps.
First, find your current average order value. A common vendor guideline puts a threshold 10% to 30% above it. Treat that as a starting range to test, not a result.
Second, count the orders that already land within one shipping charge below your candidate threshold. Those are the shoppers the threshold can move. If they are a small share, the threshold is too high or too low.
Third, look at what those shoppers needed. A person who is $9 short and asks which accessory fits is a person a short live call can help, because the answer to "what goes with this?" is worth more than a banner saying "add $9 for free shipping".
Run it as a test for two weeks, with the old threshold as the comparison, and measure units per order as well as AOV. Our post on five ways to raise average order value covers other levers to pair with it.
Source
Metorik, "Free shipping statistics", published 15 July 2026 (orders placed in 2025, a randomised sample of more than 6,000 stores and more than 65 million orders on the Metorik platform; per-store median order value $123 with free shipping against $80 with paid shipping; weighted market average $96 against $116; average shipping charge when one is charged $9.27). The sample covers stores that use Metorik, so it is not the whole market. The page gives no threshold amounts. The 10% to 30% rule of thumb in the last section is a common vendor guideline (for example Personizely's glossary), not a research finding. The store figures in the body are invented for illustration and are not BeamCart results. Photos: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (Dollar Tree shopping cart at the Rose Hill Shopping Center; Tirua container ship; Ingenico iPP350 payment terminal).
