Shipping options: the questions we get asked most

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The questions about shipping options that come up most often on our calls.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Do we need to care about this?

Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How do we know it is working?

Show the options before checkout, not inside it. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about shipping options before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.