The basics · 4 min read
How should a small online store handle shipping?
The short answer
Decide the rule before you decide the rates. Flat fee, free above a threshold, or charged by zone are the three real options, and the worst outcome is showing a cost only at the final step. Most abandoned baskets are a shipping surprise rather than a price objection.
On this page
Shipping is the part of an online shop that people leave until last, and it is the part that decides whether the basket turns into an order. Someone who has chosen an item and entered their address has done almost all the work. A number they were not expecting at that moment undoes it.
Pick the rule first, not the rates
There are really only three rules a small shop can run, and choosing between them is the whole decision:
A flat fee. One number, every order, everywhere you deliver. Simple to explain, simple to put on the page, and occasionally wrong in your favour or theirs. For most small shops this is the right answer and they talk themselves out of it.
Free above a threshold. A flat fee under a certain order value, nothing above it. This is the only one of the three that changes customer behaviour — people add an item to cross the line. Set the threshold above your average order, or you are giving away delivery on orders you were getting anyway.
By zone. Different rates for different areas. Honest, and the most work: you have to define the zones, keep them current, and explain them. Worth it when delivery costs genuinely differ by a lot; not worth it to save a small amount on a minority of orders.
What does not work is quoting per order by hand. It is fine for ten orders a week and impossible at thirty, and the moment it becomes impossible is the moment you are busiest.
Put the cost where people see it early
The single highest-return change on most small shops: say what delivery costs before the final step.
On the product page, in the basket, in a line in the header — anywhere that is not the last screen. People do not abandon because shipping costs money. They abandon because it appeared after they had mentally finished.
If your rule is simple enough to state in one sentence, it belongs on the page in one sentence.
Write down what you promise, in plain words
Before the first order, decide and write down four things:
- Where you deliver. Name the areas. "We deliver nationwide" is a promise you may not want to keep.
- How long it takes. A range is fine and better than a single optimistic number.
- What happens when nobody is there. This is the most common real-world problem and almost nobody writes it down.
- What happens if it arrives damaged. Decide once, calmly, rather than per incident while annoyed.
This is not a legal document. It is four short answers that stop you improvising under pressure, and they belong on the site where a customer can read them without asking.
Cash on delivery changes the shape
If you take payment on delivery, shipping is not just a cost — it is your risk. An undelivered order is your item, your trip and your time.
It is worth setting a slightly different rule for it: a higher threshold for free delivery, or confirming by message before dispatch. We wrote about running a store without card payments, and delivery is the part of that arrangement people underestimate.
Do not build the shop before you know you need one
Worth saying, because it saves people real money: a lot of businesses that think they need a full shop need a way to take an order and a way to get paid, which is a smaller thing.
Do I need an online shop covers that decision honestly, and what a retail shop's website actually needs covers the case where the answer is yes but the shop is not the point.
Put the rule where you can change it
A shipping rule is not a decision you make once. It moves when a courier's price moves, when you add an area, when you try a free-delivery threshold for a month to see what happens.
So it matters enormously where the rule is written. If it lives in a page only your developer can edit, you will not try the threshold experiment, because trying it costs an email and a wait. If you can change it yourself in a minute, you will — and the experiment is where the money is.
That is why editing your own content is part of every Helm plan rather than something you buy on top. The shop, the delivery areas and the sentence explaining them are yours to change on the afternoon you decide to change them, and orders land in a dashboard with a status rather than in an inbox you have to remember to search. A rule nobody can edit quietly stops being true, which is the same failure as a menu nobody can update.
Check the arithmetic once, properly
Take your last twenty orders. Apply each of the three rules to them. Work out what you would have charged and what delivery actually cost you.
Most people discover one of two things: that their flat fee is losing money on the far orders and they had never noticed, or that a free-delivery threshold set slightly higher would have paid for itself. Twenty orders and twenty minutes is enough to answer it, and it is a better use of an evening than comparing courier pricing pages.