Showing a Delivery Date Before Checkout: What It Takes

A delivery date shown to a shopper is your handling time plus the carrier's transit time, counted in business days from an order cut-off. Every one of those inputs depends on the location that ships. So the date is only as reliable as your prediction of which location will ship the order, and for a retailer with stores and a warehouse, that prediction is the hard part.

The other half of the answer is about control. Transit time is the carrier's estimate. Handling time is yours, and it is the part of the date to keep records for.

What goes into a delivery date shown before purchase?

Google Merchant Center defines the "arrives by" date that "customers are shown when checking out" as "maximum handling days + maximum transit days". Handling time is "the number of business days you need to process an order before it ships", which "normally starts when an order is placed by a customer and ends when a carrier picks up the package for shipment." Transit time is "the number of business days it takes for a carrier to deliver a package once it is picked up from your facility." The cut-off is "the time by which your customer needs to place an order for it to begin processing on the same day," and holidays count as non-business days.

Shopify's manual delivery dates follow similar arithmetic and show a range: "Your fulfillment time is added to the transit time of the carrier, and then the estimated delivery date range is displayed" at checkout. Its business day cut-off "is 12 pm in the local timezone of the shipping origin," and business days are Monday to Friday, with weekends and statutory holidays excluded. Shopify also offers automated dates that "use your actual fulfillment history", for stores that meet its eligibility rules, including an active US fulfillment location; an order that does not qualify, such as one where the prediction runs past five days, falls back to the manual dates.

Both describe dates shown at checkout. A date on a product page uses the same arithmetic earlier, usually before you know the delivery address.

Put together, a date needs four inputs: a cut-off time, which decides the day the count starts; a handling time; a transit time; and a business-day calendar. Each of them depends on the origin. The cut-off is local to it, handling is measured at the facility that packs, and transit starts from wherever the carrier collects. None of them can be set once for the whole business.

Which part of the date is actually yours?

The handling time. Transit comes from the carrier's estimate, and USPS, for example, says of its service standards: "Exceptions apply and delivery time is not guaranteed." Note how it counts: if you send mail on a Saturday or the day before a holiday, the Sunday or holiday is not included, so a three-day standard sent on Saturday has an expected delivery date of Wednesday. Your transit calendar should follow the carrier's delivery days, and your handling calendar should follow your own working days. They are not the same calendar.

Handling runs from the order to the moment the carrier collects the parcel, and apart from the carrier's pickup schedule, you control it. In practice it tends to drift, because it depends on stock being where the system thinks it is, on how many orders arrive before the cut-off, and on who is working that day. A store that picks online orders between customers does not have the same handling time as a warehouse shift that does nothing else, and a single account-wide handling setting hides that.

What does the FTC rule say about the shipping part?

The Federal Trade Commission's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule is written around shipment, which it defines as "the act by which the merchandise is physically placed in the possession of the carrier." That is where your handling time ends.

Under section 435.2(a)(1), a seller must have, at the time of the solicitation, a reasonable basis to expect to ship within the time "clearly and conspicuously stated in any such solicitation", or, if no time is stated, "within thirty (30) days after receipt of a properly completed order from the buyer." Where the buyer applies to the seller for credit at the time of ordering, the seller has fifty days rather than thirty. The FTC's business guide defines a reasonable basis as "such information as would under the circumstances satisfy a reasonable and prudent businessperson, acting in good faith, that the representation is true", and says you need one for "any express or implied shipment representation." It lists the questions to ask, including: "Is the demand for each advertised item reasonably anticipated?" and "For all promotions in the relevant sales seasons, can the fulfillment system handle the cumulative anticipated demand for all products?"

Records matter. Under section 435.2(a)(4), a seller's failure "to have records or other documentary proof establishing its use of systems and procedures which assure the shipment of merchandise" in the applicable time "will create a rebuttable presumption that the seller lacked a reasonable basis". The Rule also sets out what you must tell a customer, and what choices you must offer them, when you cannot ship in time. Read the FTC's own guide for that part rather than a summary of it.

Whether a particular delivery date counts as a shipment representation is a question for your counsel. Either way, a delivery date is built on a handling time, and it is good practice to keep records that show you can meet it.

Why do dates break when a different location ships?

This failure is easy to miss when the date and the routing rule are set up in different places. The date is calculated from an origin. If the order is later routed somewhere else, every input changes at once: a different cut-off, a different handling time and a different transit zone to the customer.

Consider a retailer with a warehouse and a dozen stores that set the warehouse as the origin for its dates. After an order is placed, the warehouse turns out to be short, and the order routes to a store. The store is a time zone west of the warehouse, so its local noon cut-off has not passed yet, which helps. But it picks online orders once a day and is two transit days further from the customer, which does not. The customer was shown a date for a shipment that did not happen. Nothing was wrong with the carrier data, and nothing was wrong with the store. The date and the routing decision were made from different assumptions.

There are three honest ways to handle this:

• Calculate the date from the same rule that routes the order, so the location that sets the date is the location that ships. That needs at least the shopper's ZIP code before a date can be shown, because routing depends on the destination. How routing decides which location ships covers the rules that choose it.
• Show the latest date among the locations that could ship it, so a reroute within that set should not make the order later than the date shown.
• Show a range rather than a single day when the eligible locations are far apart, and narrow it once the order is allocated.

The first is the most accurate and needs the most discipline. The second is the simplest safe option. What does not work is showing a date from one location and shipping from another.

What to check before you show a date

• A cut-off per location, in that location's time zone. A single cut-off is wrong for any site in a different time zone or with a different carrier pickup time.
• A carrier pickup or drop-off time per location, because that is where handling ends.
• A handling time per location that holds when volume rises. The FTC's guide asks whether the fulfillment system can handle "the cumulative anticipated demand" for all promotions in the relevant sales seasons.
• A business-day calendar per location, including the holidays each one actually observes.
• Transit estimates by origin and destination, not one national figure. Choosing a carrier per order changes transit too, so the date should use the transit time of the slowest service your rate shopping might pick.
• Separate treatment for items outside your normal handling time, such as pre-orders, backorders and drop-shipped lines, and a rule for which date to show when an order will be split.
• Stock you can trust at the origin. A date calculated from a location that shows stock it does not have is a date for an order that will be rerouted or cancelled. Stores are often the weak point, and the cost of shipping from a store includes the labour that store handling time depends on.
• Records of actual ship times by location, so you can compare what you showed with what happened and adjust the handling time as soon as actual ship times fall behind it.

If you cannot yet say which location will ship an order while the customer is looking at the product, show a range, or show the date once the shopper has given a ZIP code or reached checkout. A later date you meet does less damage than an earlier one you miss.