A short guide to shipping options

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Everything we would tell a client about shipping options in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What it costs to ignore

Clear delivery estimates reduce support enquiries. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How we handle it

A free threshold reliably lifts average order value. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to watch for

Show the options before checkout, not inside it. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about shipping options before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Show the options before checkout, not inside it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.