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Åhléns is one of Sweden's best known retail names, with around 52 stores across the country and an e-commerce platform at ahlens.se. Its catalog spans beauty, home, fashion and children's products, which puts a wide range of parcel sizes and margins through the same checkout.
Most delivery strategies are inherited. A free delivery threshold gets set once, a carrier gets ranked first because it always has been, and the logic stays in place while shopper behavior changes and navigates around it.
That was the position Zubair Bhatti found when he joined Åhléns. His current remit as E-commerce Last Mile Manager covers everything a shopper touches from checkout to delivery: carrier agreements, cost efficiency, budgets, warehouse coordination, customer experience, checkout conversion, and more.
"When I came in and saw the checkout and the strategy we had, it was a quite old view of what the customer wants. The same threshold all the time, and that's it."
The cost of that setup compounds. One flat delivery fee across all carriers ignores that each carrier agreement is different and built on different terms, so the same threshold cannot be right for all of them, neither from a customer experience perspective nor a profitability perspective.
Zubair uses a simple illustration of how far the logic can drift: a retailer running a 999 SEK free delivery threshold, with average order value (AOV) already around 999 SEK, doesn’t actively steer customer behavior towards the desired outcome. The threshold should nudge shoppers toward one clear action: adding a little more to qualify for free delivery.
Because none of it is measured, the assumptions behind it evolve into internal truths that nobody can argue with. The fear underneath is familiar to every e-commerce team: charge for shipping and shoppers walk, the reason many retailers never test the question at all.
Before re-configuring the shopper-facing side, Zubair analyzed every carrier agreement and setup from both a customer experience and a profitability perspective for Åhléns. That analysis showed why a single threshold across all carriers could not work. Parcel locker deliveries, one of the largest volumes in the Åhléns checkout, became the first place to test.
The team raised the free delivery threshold on locker deliveries and watched what happened. Order volumes and conversion held, but there was a clear shift in the delivery options customers picked: in-store pickup replaced locker deliveries.
"The customer actually wants to buy, they just don't want to pay that much money for delivery, which is okay for us. If they specifically want locker delivery, it comes with a fee.”
That finding opened up the rest. With evidence that price sensitivity moved shopping choice rather than intent, Åhléns restructured the whole checkout: which option ranks first, second, third, with maximum weight and dimension filtering applied throughout. Zubair names that restructure as a big driver behind the increase in average delivery fee.
One test was never going to hold, though. Shopper behavior at Åhléns looks different at the start of the year than it does mid-year or during Black Week, so the threshold gets revisited by season rather than set and left: "Doing one threshold test won't solve your numbers, it has to be a regular tactic."
Rather than a binary free or not free, Åhléns now works with the delivery fee itself. Customers the business knows to be high spenders get free delivery, because shipping cost doesn’t typically decide their order.
Customers who need a nudge get a reduction instead: above a 999 SEK cart, the delivery fee drops by half, from 39 SEK to 19 SEK. The threshold also has slack in it, depending on the season. For example, by actively working to shape a specific customer behavior, Åhléns can position free delivery during certain periods, like a slow summer, as a strong unique selling proposition (USP) rather than an ongoing expectation. This turns free delivery into a sales driver that can boost conversion instead of a standing cost.
Raising a free delivery threshold only works if shoppers can reach it. Checkout is already a vulnerable moment for e-commerce retailers, and having customers go back into discovery, the stage where brands often add confusion instead of shopping ease, risks losing them altogether.
So Åhléns added a carousel of beauty products priced between 50 and 100 SEK inside the checkout itself, alongside the message telling customers how far they are from free delivery, keeping them in their decision-making flow and helping them make the right decision quickly. Average cart value rose 2.3%, which Zubair attributes to the higher free delivery threshold and the carousel working together.
Pickup in store supports Åhléns' omnichannel strategy, and customers who collect an order in person often buy something while they are there. So that option is pre-selected in the checkout by default, and A/B testing confirmed that shoppers do not push back on it: there's been no drop in conversion or any sign of customers struggling to find what they wanted.
Pre-selected delivery options grew 15.2% year over year. Then an AI-powered test of delivery category ranking complicated the picture in a useful way. It showed that always ranking store pickup first may not suit customers who live a long way from one.
"Given our omnichannel strategy, we always need an outside perspective, where we present delivery options based on what the customer actually needs. We saw evidence that pre-selecting in-store pickup isn't the right way to go for every customer. In Stockholm, Malmö, Göteborg we can have this, but out in the countryside, we have to think a little bit outside the box."
Free delivery threshold testing moved the most cart value and delivery revenue KPIs, but the checkout has also become the place Åhléns settles operational questions that have nothing to do with delivery fees. Testing lets Åhléns weigh cost directly against lost sales: for example, faster delivery vs. operational cost. Without measurability, it's not possible to make the best possible decision.
All figures are year over year (YoY), measured in Ingrid Analytics.
→ 29.9% average delivery fee increase;
→ 15.2% pre-selected delivery options;
→ 2.3% average cart value growth;
→ 1.4% conversion rate increase.
The delivery fee number is the one that usually raises eyebrows. Charging shoppers more for delivery is supposed to cost you conversion and orders. At Åhléns it did neither, because the fee increase arrived alongside a restructured option ranking and a cart-building mechanic at the threshold. This reflects how Åhléns actively works with customer behavior, which often shifts for different reasons. For retailers, staying relevant and logical is key to making the customer journey easier.
The roadmap at Åhléns points toward a dynamic checkout, where the delivery options a shopper sees reflect what they buy, how they like it delivered, how they pay and how they want to be kept informed afterwards.
Average delivery fee increase
Conversion growth
Average cart value growth
Pre-selected delivery options
"Some people might look at the 30% delivery fee increase and say: ‘You guys must have lost on conversion.’ Actually, we didn't, it even went up 1.4%. Test your assumptions first, because those are often too old to keep carrying on. The customer has changed, the customer behavior has changed, so e-commerce teams have to try new things. Let the customer be the voice of the change.”
