They have a strong effect, especially when they come as a surprise. A cost discovered at the last step drives away people who were ready to pay. The same information, shown on the product page, goes over far better.
The benchmark
Look through your purchase journey for the step where the shipping price and delivery date first appear, and measure the exit rate at that step.
If it's clearly higher than at the neighboring steps, you have your answer. Baymard Institute surveys rank unexpected costs first among reasons for abandoning at checkout, cited by 40% of respondents, ahead of delivery that's too slow and a total cost that can't be calculated in advance.
At a childcare brand the authors work with, two out of three add-to-carts moved on to payment on mobile, versus four out of five on desktop.
Nothing was broken; the mobile cart showed neither the total nor the shipping. A customer of a home decor brand described the same mechanism, seen from the other side:
"If I lived in New Zealand and wanted to buy a cushion, I'd add it to the cart. But if I see in the cart that the filling adds 100 euros, I'll buy one near me and give up."
The rule
Shipping price and delivery date should be readable before the cart. A date beats a time frame: "delivered Thursday" is understood faster than "48 to 72 business hours."
And customers prefer a reliable date to a fast one: in Europe, three in four shoppers say they would rather wait longer than pay for shipping, and a third accept four to five days.
In Germany, three in four visitors check the estimated date before they confirm.
The steps
- The product page. Show the cost, the free shipping threshold and the estimated date. On Shopify, the "Estimated delivery dates" setting calculates them from your history or the lead times you enter, on all paid plans.
- The cart. Repeat them, along with the amount left to reach free shipping.
- The pickup point. Offer it first if it's cheaper; in France, nearly one in two deliveries is made somewhere other than the customer's home.
- The measurement. Track the move from cart to order before and after, by device.
A line to say to your leadership, to adapt with your own lead times:
"We only announce the date we hit 95% of the time, we show it on the product page, and we judge it by the move from cart to order."
The trap
Promising fast delivery to sell more is the most tempting trap. People don't compare your lead time to Amazon's; they compare it to what you wrote them, and a date met at four days gives them more reasons to come back than a date missed at two.
The second trap is a free shipping threshold set up without testing: at a high-basket brand, free shipping from €300 raised add-to-carts by 2.6% and cut conversion by 24%.
The brand and the authors were both convinced it would work, and only the test caught it.
