Shipping policy: setting delivery expectations you can meet

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.

What to state

• Where you ship. Countries or regions, and honestly — not everywhere with exclusions discovered at checkout.
• Cost, including how it is calculated and any threshold for free delivery. Surprise shipping cost is the single largest cause of abandoned baskets, covered in how to stop losing sales at checkout.
• Dispatch time and delivery time as two separate numbers. Conflating them is where most disappointment starts: two to three days usually means dispatch, and the customer heard delivery.
• The cut-off for same-day dispatch, and which days you do not dispatch at all.
• Whether tracking is provided and how it arrives.
• Customs, duties and import taxes for international orders — who pays, said plainly. This is the most expensive surprise a cross-border buyer can get.
• What happens if a parcel is lost, delayed or arrives damaged, and how long you ask them to wait before reporting it.

Promising times you can keep

1. Measure what you actually do. Take the last fifty orders, calculate order to dispatch and dispatch to delivery, and look at the slowest ten rather than the average.
2. Publish a range that covers the great majority of those, not the best case. A promise met at the slow end beats a fast one missed.
3. Add a buffer for the periods you already know are worse — holidays, sales, your own quiet weeks.
4. Show the expected date on the product page, not only at checkout. That is where the decision is made.
5. Tell people when something slips, before they ask. A proactive message about a delay generates a fraction of the complaints that silence does.

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 shipping, and what it is really for

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.

Where it lives

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.