Free shipping - carrier and cart rule problems

[Twingo74]

I am pretty new to PS and have been spending the last whole week dealing with various problems instead of configuring my online shop as intended. 

 

I simply want to offer my customers free shipping if they make purchases for more than a certain amount of money. 

 

Running PS 1.6.1.7 - Theme default bootstrap

 

First method: 

I configured free shipping with shipping -- preferences which is intended to simply do this function. 

I also configured 3 different carriers manually calculating the shipping costs based on weight. 

Problem: free shipping always appeared when a customer added any product to the cart. 

What I tried as a solution: After spending hours looking for a solution to this problem, I totally removed the free shipping from the preferences, added handling costs of 0.05 and removed any free-shipping by the carriers. The problem still exists

 

Second method: 

I read on the forum a suggestion to use cart rules to offer free shipping. As I only ship nationally, I added a new zone with my country and configured the carriers to only ship to it. 

I added a cart rule with the following: 

Name: Free shipping start at x 

code: (empty)

Highlight: yes

Partial use: yes

Priority: 1

Status: yes

 

Conditions: 

customer: (empty)

From: 07.10.2016 to 31.01.2022

Minimum amount: 50 - tax excluded - shipping excluded

Total available: 1000000

Total available for each user: 1000000

 

Restrictions: carrier selection

3 selected carriers and one unselected carrier (for which I don't want to offer free shipping - express shipping). 

 

Actions: free shipping (yes). 

 

When I tried making orders with the current configurations (carrier, free shipping and cart rule) I had the following problems: 

- as a guest customer logged in:  when I add any product to the cart (far below the free shipping amount), it shows free shipping in the cart and all through the check out process up until the last step. 

- I increased the order to go over the free shipping cart rule. The free shipping text was uncorrectly already present in the cart.

When I further go to shipping, the carrier that I excluded in the cart rule is on the list of carriers although the order amount is over the cart rule minimum

If I choose the standard carrier, at the end the shipping is not added and it is free shipping.

If I choose the express carrier, the shipping costs appear in the cart. 

 

The problem is: the whole process is not logical and very confusing to the customer. 

The customer does not know that the priority carrier is not an option for free shipping. 

The cart always shows free shipping right from the start  no matter how low or high the order is. 

 

It seems that there is something wrong in this process. 

 

Is there a way to solve these problems? I would very much appreciate any help. 

Thank you.