LL Bean's Free Shipping Tips the Internet Shopping Scale in Their Favor

Cool! LL Bean is usually really smart when it comes to their branding. I had the chance to go visit their HQs/store in Maine last month and was truly impressed with their concept and customer experience. I had a lot of fun shopping there so I wish them the best with their promotion. Hopefully they'll break with the minimum purchase theory (I heard about it once before in a mkt. research class and didn't convince me much either)...it'll make for an interesting case study.

LL Bean will never know if the promotion will make or lose money if they are offering it to everyone and have not set up test segments. Offering free shipping is an act of desperation if there is no way to evaluate the ROI. If they were to offer free shipping as a permanent policy and build the added costs into their margins, that would be news.
Shipping is a profit center for most direct response businesses and has become an addiction. Free shipping as a policy could be a great a competitive advantage for certain types of businesses so I am surprised that I don't see it more often.

Interesting. With free shipping and (for me, in NH) no sales tax, it's literally cheaper for me to order from them online than it is for me to drive to the store. Perhaps the ROI isn't just in the shipping, but driving consumers to web/catalogue purchases, which have lower overhead costs than brick and mortar. If they can make more and more customers comfortable with online purchases, it will be profitable further down the line, long after the free shipping ends.