No one loves treats more than us, so on this - our favorite holiday - we'd like to announce one for you: SparkFun now offers free economy shipping worldwide on orders $60 and up!
If you've been with us for a while you know that we've offered short-term deals on shipping in the past - on Cyber Monday 2012 we offered free shipping on all orders for one day, and last summer we tested out free shipping for a week in July. This time, IT'S FOR REAL. Or at least we hope it will be. Here's how it works: When you (anyone - customers, distributors, educators, robots) place an order over $60, you'll be given an option for one free shipping method (domestic or international) at check out. And that's it!*
*That's not it - if your shipping cost is over $500, you won't see an automatic option for free shipping, and you'll need to contact customerservice@sparkfun.com (Also, _what_ are you BUILDING?!).
Free shipping isn't a groundbreaking discovery, and you may be wondering why we've waited until now to offer it. SparkFun ships to...almost every country (145 this year so far!), and our catalog and shipping costs are extremely varied. We've wanted to provide free shipping to our customers for years, and it's been a challenge to get the math right and make sure free shipping is a viable option for both you AND us. We actually launched free shipping quietly a week ago, and after checking out the preliminary numbers we've decided to stick with it! For how long? Well, right now it's firmly open-ended, and the rules and program may change as we evaluate the cost to us and the benefit to you, but for now, happy shipping, and happy Halloween!
Edit: In case you're wondering what Halloween is like around these parts, check out today's costumed revelry:
ReplaceMeOpen
ReplaceMeClose
Is this free shipping on orders over $60 from now on? Because that is amazing.
Also, I am so close to catching that ghost.
I'm close too, just don't cross the beams. :-)
Pretty much, yeah. There's no guarantee that we'll be running the program exactly like this until the heat death of the universe, but it's open-ended.
Sooo... what's up with a ghost? =)
What ghost?
Ghost in the machine, right?
This needs moar upboatz
You ask "What are you building" because my order is over $500?? I'm not building ANYTHING, I just clicked on EVERYTHING trying to get that darned ghost!! :-)
Not your order cost, your shipping cost. $500 in shipping alone... that's a whole lotta cheese.
Woot!!! While I do technically live in the USA most vendors do not include Hawaii (or Alaska) in their FREE SHIPPING. This new service makes Sparkfun even more my favorite vendor. Thanks!! (and come on back soon!) http://www.mauimakers.com/blog/2013/10/sparkfun-national-tour-visits-maui-october-2013/
I see myself accidentally proceeding through checkout with $60+ of stuff trying to catch this darn ghost
My $61 order has already been shipped for free. I also managed to use the small sat discount code for one last time ;)
OK, I finally clicked on the ghost. I was very disappointed. No gift card or reward or anything like that. It just gets spooked and flies off the screen.
Really? When I finally clicked on it I got a supermodel and a speedboat. Unfortunately it was in that order. Now I have to figure out how to get the boat out of my cubicle and then clean up the squished supermodel.
Never mind, I clicked on the ghost again, and got every item on the site. But I had to pay for shipping because it came out to $499.99
EDIT: The ghost was in the box, and now it's flying around my house. It's now 10 times harder to catch,,and drops heavy, metal exclamation points
It does that if you DONT click on it.
It does the same thing if you click on it too
How to catch the ghost:
Let your cursor sit vewwwy still. Ghost will show up nearby.
Scroll away from the ghost and gently move your cursor over/under it.
Ghost moves into position
Scroll so you are over the Ghost.
Click the ghost.
[redacted]
To catch the ghost, (at least in Firefox, haven't tried other browsers) 1) Click on some hyperlink like the up-vote number in the comment headers and keep your mouse button held down 2) Wait for the ghost to appear and stop moving 3) While continuing to hold the mouse button down, move the cursor on top of the ghost 4) Let up on the button and re-click as fast as possible 5) You should now have a captured ghost you can move around along with a little circle with a line going through the middle.
if only the ghost did something other than close windows when I clicked it :D
Awesome news! Upcoming order awaits...
This is a long time coming so I will be looking for some stuff from Sparkfun...I have shopped other places, like www.prplsqrl.com , to get things with free shipping cause I tend to buy a lot of things at one time.
$150 order on October 14th, and my shipping came to $46!!! If I'd have waited a week, I'd have got my shipping for free! What's the chance of Sparkfun pulling an Apple and rebating customers who paid for shipping for a certain period of time before they rolled out the offer?
I think we're probably not going to do this, if for no other reason than that it'd be painful to figure out who would have been eligible and a mechanism for refunding those dollars. Your order, for example, used a shipping method that wouldn't have been free under the current plan. It seems like the only approximately fair way to go about this would be to assume that everyone who might have had the option would have taken it, and then refund them the full amount they paid (rather a lot more money than the low-end free option, in many cases). And then of course there is the question of what to say to the people who ordered (certain-period-of-time + 1 day) ago, whose shipping also might have been free if they'd only waited that one day, and the question of how our accounting should handle this change in revenue for all the (certain-period-of-time) orders...
Is that Nate behind batman?
The redshirt? Yes, that's Nate.
That is awesome. My average order over the past 4.44 yrs is $58.68, so you just made an extra $1.32 per order!
I wouldn't be surprised if they ran the numbers on previous orders to find the optimal price point.
One week after I bought something in the sparkfun there is always a free shipping promotion. There is a way to predict the free shipping promotion ?
This is our third go-round at free shipping. Once last Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving) for just a day, then a week in July. Each time was to test the waters to see if we could afford to do it long term. It took us a while, while working on lots of other projects, to figure out how we wanted to run it, so now here it is. It's open-ended so you can expect to be around for an undetermined amount of time. Also, we won't go turning it off at a moment's notice should we suddenly need to. There will be a fair warning with plenty of time to enjoy it while it lasts.
Until then, there's no deadline. We just have a free shipping program now. =D
Now you tell me!!!!??? I just placed and order two days ago. Sheeesh!
Ok so I'm in their source code and I will have the answer soon >:)
Btw Sparkfun IT: ROT13...? Really...? Obvious ;)
Uno Dos
Also note the ASCII version sparkfun logo in the code too EDIT: The promo code in the translation of the ROT13 text has already been used :(
___ _ ___ / |_ __ __ _ _ | || __| _ _ _ __ \ '_ \/ ` | '| / / | || | ' \ |/ .__/__,|| |__| _,|||| |_|
Not to sound ungrateful, but I think this is a necessary change that was a long time coming. Given the premium price of many generic parts, and the larger availability of parts from competing vendors, you've gotta stay competitive. Shipping charges from Sparkfun have, in the past, made me seek out other vendors because I don't want to be paying 1/3rd-1/6th the price of what I'm buying in additional shipping. It really adds up, and is especially amplified for smaller orders.
I'd actually prefer the threshold reduced to $25 like Amazon does to encourage more impulsive purchases, but I realize you guys don't have the same large distribution network to make it happen. Perhaps non-bulky goods could qualify for something like that. Still, at least with this change we can consolidate our orders to avoid getting dimed by the freight charges.
Actually Amazon just raised the bar to $35.
It's possible to spend less than $60 on an order??!?!?! >8-0
I wouldn't recommend it.
That ghost reminds me of a unix game that had cockroachs running all over the screen.
How long will there be free shipping for? Also, does this really apply to customers ALL around the world as I think it was last time? (I am from Argentina so... I want to know)
All customers world-wide. And there's no set date for the program to stop... it's open-ended.
OK, thanks for the info.
Hola compatriota, cómo está el tema de recibir cosas de afuera por correo ahora en Arg.? llegan o las intercepta Moreno ??? Saludos, José Luis.