Skip to footer

Target expands free shipping

Target announced Monday that it will offer free shipping to customers who order $25 or more in merchandise online, a move that puts it in direct competition with Amazon, which has a $35 free shipping limit. 

|
Jim Young/Reuters/File
A sign for a Target store in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill. The second-largest retailer in the United States announced Monday, Feb. 23, 2015 that it is expanding its free shipping for online shoppers.

Watch out, Amazon. Target is offering free shipping to more online shoppers.

Target, the second-largest retailer in the United States, announced Monday that it is offering free shipping for customers who order $25 or more worth of merchandise from its website.

That’s down from $50 and comes on the heels of what the company says was a record holiday season for Internet sales.

“We saw an enthusiastic response to our free shipping offer over the holidays,” Jason Goldberger, president of Target.com and mobile sales, said in a news release. “Now, whether guests are stocking up or doing fill-in shopping, we’ve enhanced our year-round shipping offer to be one of the best in all of retail.”

The company says Target.com set new sales records on Thanksgiving and Black Friday last year and that mobile accounted for 60% of traffic to the site.

For years, Amazon had offered free shipping on orders of $25 and up. But, in 2013, the Web-shopping titan increased that threshold to $35 for customers who aren’t Amazon Prime members.

As digital sales, particularly via mobile, continue to supplant brick-and-mortar browsing, Target has made Web sales a bigger priority. Late last year, the company began shipping online orders from select retail stores instead of a centralized warehouse — a move it says speeded up delivery times.

This year, it plans to open two new online-fulfillment stores – in Memphis, Tennessee, and York, Pennsylvania.

The Target release said the $25 free-shipping threshold is available with “virtually no exclusions,” but did not specify what those exclusions might be. Target’s website saysthere is a fee for shipping some oversize items.

Discount-store rival Walmart offers free shipping on orders of $50 or more.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Target expands free shipping
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2015/0223/Target-expands-free-shipping
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe