The Apple Holiday Gift Guide: More Free Shipping

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The Apple Holiday Gift Guide: More Free Shipping

© courtesy of Apple Inc.

As a means to boost sales during the critical holiday season, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) plans to offset what may be slow iPhone 7 sales with a number of its products aimed at year-end shoppers. What would online shopping be without free shipping? Apple has its own version.

Apple’s free shipping plan is not very attractive, although it is like a number of others: Free two-day delivery for items in stock. Orders need to be made before 5 p.m. Apple has several free shipping options:

Get free next-day delivery on any in-stock iPhone and free two-day delivery on almost everything else. Faster options are also available.

In other words, the iPhone is special, and consumers can pay more to speed shipping of other items.

Pick up most items — usually within an hour — or let us know if someone else is picking up for you. We can even help set up your new Apple products.

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Other large retailers like this option because it saves their costs of providing free shipping.

We offer same-day courier delivery in certain locations for in-stock Apple products. You can select this option at checkout if it’s available.

The very expensive option. For example, next day shipping costs $17 to $20, in some cases.

One would think Apple’s products would be enough and the company would not have to resort to free shipping, but some products may have particularly slow sales in the fourth quarter. First among these is Apple Watch. Apple is pushing the entire smartwatch family in hopes the holidays will give it some modest help. And iPhone 7 holiday sales are essential to Apple’s revenue and its investors.

Free two-day shipping, even from Apple.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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