Looking for Feedback on Liguori Free Shipping Offer

Hello:

This will be brief and completely related to Liguori Publications. I just had a conversation (disagreement) with a lady in our Order Processing group and I'm hoping to get some feedback from my Dark Glass readers. We just started a web special that gives Free US Ground Shipping on any order of $20 or more (good through the end of the month).

The disagreement revolves around customers who placed orders prior to the sale. The lady calls and asks me what the cutoff should be for modifying orders? "Modify?", I ask. "You know for the people who placed orders before the sale but call in for the offer." I'll keep the "he said, she said" short and just say that I made an ultimatum. You either get the sale offer or you don't. You don't go the department store and ask for the sale they're having tomorrow. I don't think we should adjust orders that have all ready been placed.

To me - the nature of a sale is that the pricing or offer is special. In this case, we started the offer because we noticed a lot of abandoned shopping carts with totals less than $20. At that price point shipping is prohibitively expensive. Someone can end up paying $8.00 to get a $1.00 pamphlet. With this special; customers can stock up on small things like prayer cards, pamphlets, and devotional items without spending more on shipping than they do for the product. It's also a great time to buy gift items like cookbooks or travel books, but it is the small items I really have in mind. The offer is timely too. Anyone who orders by March 31st, should have no problem receiving their package by Good Friday. It's a good chance for someone to order our Lent and Easter titles at a good value.

Liguori Publications is a not-for-profit charged with furthering the Gospel of Jesus Christ and supporting the work of the Redemptorist Fathers and the Catholic Church in general. Because of that, a lot of people (both inside and outside of the company) think we should give our product away. That would do a lot to promote our mission - for the short period of time until we were forced to close our doors and send away our employees.

So anyway - I am genuinely interested in feedback from my readers. Am I being too strict? Are some customers too pushy? How do you feel these situations should be handled?

Peace,

P. Del Ricci - Dark Glass