Most complaints about delivery are not about speed. They are about a date that was implied and then missed — which makes the shipping policy a page about honesty rather than logistics.
A shipping policy tells customers where you deliver, what it costs, how long it takes, and what happens when something goes wrong on the way. It looks like the least interesting page on a shop and it is one of the most read: delivery cost and delivery time are the two facts people look for before deciding to order, and hiding either of them until checkout is the most reliable way to lose the sale.
The framing that helps is that this is a page about expectations rather than logistics. Almost every angry delivery message is not really about the parcel being slow — it is about a date the customer believed and you did not meet.
Separate the dispatch promise from the carrier promise, in writing. You control when a parcel leaves; you do not control what happens afterwards, and a policy that blurs the two makes you responsible for the whole thing in the customer's mind. Saying we dispatch within one working day, and delivery then usually takes two to four is both more honest and easier to defend when a carrier is having a bad week.
Free delivery is a pricing decision rather than a logistics one. A threshold — free over a certain amount — lifts average order value reliably, and the number should be set a little above your current average rather than at a figure nobody reaches. Building the cost into the product price and calling it free works and is legitimate, provided the total stays competitive; what does not work is a low price with a shipping cost revealed at the final step, which converts interest into an abandoned basket and occasionally a complaint about hidden charges.
Ettex Sites hosts the policy as a standing page and lets the key facts appear where they are needed — on the product page and in the basket rather than only in the footer. The related documents are returns policy and terms and conditions, and the checkout mechanics themselves are in checkout page.
The boundary: we are not a shipping platform. There is no carrier integration, no rate calculation from live carrier APIs, no label printing and no tracking import. Rates and times are what you publish and what you have measured; the parcels are somebody else's system.
Destinations, cost and how it is calculated, dispatch time and delivery time as separate figures, cut-off times, tracking, customs responsibility for international orders, and what happens to lost or damaged parcels.
Measure your last fifty orders, look at the slowest ten rather than the average, publish a range covering the great majority, and add a buffer for known busy periods.
Yes — on the product page if possible. Surprise shipping cost at the final step is the largest single cause of abandoned baskets.
Whoever your policy says, and it must say. Unexpected import charges on delivery are the most damaging surprise in cross-border selling and generate refund requests you cannot easily refuse.
A returns policy is read before the purchase far more often than after it. Written as a defence against fraud it costs you sales; written as a promise it becomes one of the strongest reasons to order.
Terms and conditions are the contract between you and whoever uses your site. Copied from another business, they describe somebody else's arrangements — which is how most small sites end up with terms that contradict their own product.
Alt text is the shortest writing task on a website and the one most consistently done badly — either skipped entirely or stuffed with keywords for a search engine that stopped rewarding it years ago.