How to get shipping options right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to shipping options is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Why it matters
Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- A free threshold reliably lifts average order value
- Show the options before checkout, not inside it
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Show the options before checkout, not inside it. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Turning this into a decision
The short version
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
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.