Five mistakes teams make with shipping options
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit shipping options.
Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
What to watch for
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries
- A free threshold reliably lifts average order value
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Show the options before checkout, not inside it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What to do next
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
- 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.