title: Free shipping by number of items, not monetary value, in Bigcommerce
body: <p><strong>I've been asked by a client to look into the possibility of allowing free shipping for orders of more than three items.</strong> Essentially this means allowing for a (shipping) pricing structure based on item count rather than total value.</p>
  
  <p><em>(For a TL;DR, you could probably stop with that problem statement, but I'll provide some solution investigation context below. Maybe I've missed something.)</em></p>
  
  <p>The admin UI only allows for setting free shipping based on monetary value. Similarly, the "Ship by" category of price options adds the ability to use weight in calculations, but alas not item count.</p>
  
  <p>There seems to be no way to influence the shipping cost through the API. A <code>%%GLOBAL_ShippingPrice%%</code> variable is available to templates and, as I understand things, is calculated only using those admin-configured shipping configuration options described above. The Shipping API only seems to deal with shipping methods (physical not API methods!), and unfortunately the Orders API seems to offer nothing related to shipping costs either. Hmm.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked into hacking the template files, but <a href="https://developer.bigcommerce.com/themes/syntax" rel="nofollow">cannot find any support for custom expressions</a> using the variables available.</p>
  
  <p>We've asked Bigcommerce support, <a href="http://ideas.bigcommerce.com/forums/178746-bigcommerce-ideas/suggestions/6994649-free-shipping-if-you-order-three-products-or-more" rel="nofollow">submitted an "idea"</a>, and obviously searched the interwebs and poked around the developer documentation. I'm so new, I only heard about Bigcommerce yesterday.</p>
  
  <p>Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><em>Note: First draft of this question included an inline screenshot and lots of relevant hyperlinks. Seems important for a quality question. Apparently I need more karma to insert most of that. I'll edit this question later, if possible and I ever get there, to include those helpful features.</em></p>