What to ask your agency about shipping options

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on shipping options, these questions are worth asking early.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Show the options before checkout, not inside it. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.