Shipping options: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about shipping options this quarter, make it the first item below.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Start here

Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

A free threshold reliably lifts average order value. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Show the options before checkout, not inside it. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

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
• A free threshold reliably lifts average order value — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.