A Shop With No Shipping Information

The site

A small manufacturer selling directly, with well photographed products and clear descriptions.

Each product page has a price, a size, and an Add to Cart button.

There is no mention of shipping anywhere: not on the product page, not in the menu, not in the footer.

The cost appears at the final step of checkout, after an address has been entered.

The inference a visitor makes

• Will they ship here.
• What will it cost.
• How long will it take.
• I will have to start checkout to find out.
• I will look elsewhere.

The fourth is the barrier and it is more expensive than a high shipping cost would be. Somebody unwilling to enter an address to discover a figure leaves at the product page, which is earlier than any abandonment statistic captures.

The four questions

Which is the entire content of the page that is missing.

Where you ship: which provinces, whether you ship internationally, and anywhere you cannot send to.

What it costs: a flat rate, a table by weight or region, or free above a threshold.

How long it takes: dispatch time and transit time as separate figures, since those are different things.

And what happens if something is wrong: damaged, lost, or simply not wanted.

Four headings on a single page, written once, and then linked from every product page on the site.

Dispatch and transit are different

Which almost every small shop conflates.

A customer reads five to seven days as the time until it arrives.

A maker frequently means five to seven days before it goes out, plus transit on top.

That mismatch produces the enquiry on day six asking where the parcel is, and a customer who feels misled rather than merely impatient.

Say both plainly: dispatched within this many days, then arriving within this many after that.

For anything made to order, say the making time separately again, since that is a third number people need.

A worked example

The manufacturer added a shipping page with the four headings and a link to it from every product page under the price.

They also put a one-line summary on the product page itself: flat rate within Canada, free above a threshold, dispatched in two days.

Cart abandonment fell, which was expected, and the larger change was in the number of people reaching the cart at all.

Enquiries asking about shipping stopped almost entirely.

The page took about an hour, and half of that was spent deciding the international answer.

The writing itself was twenty minutes.

Nothing about the products or the prices changed.

Put the summary on the product page

Since a linked page is still a click away at the moment of deciding.

One line under the price answering the cost and the timing covers most of it.

Somebody who wants the detail follows the link, and somebody who only needed reassurance has it without leaving the page.

That single line is the highest-return element on a small shop's product page after the price itself.

Where shipping is genuinely complicated, say the range and link to the detail rather than saying nothing at all.

A range is information and silence is a reason to leave.

That principle covers most of the decisions on this page.

Say the international answer plainly

Which is where small shops hedge and lose people.

Either you ship internationally or you do not, and both are perfectly good answers.

If you do, say what it costs, how long it takes, and state that duties and taxes are the buyer's responsibility, which they are.

If you do not, say so clearly on the shipping page so somebody does not fill a cart to discover it.

Saying nothing is the only answer that costs you something, since people assume the worst and leave.

The same applies to remote parts of the country, where a flat rate frequently does not apply.

Returns belong on the same page

Since it is the same anxiety.

Somebody buying something they cannot see wants to know what happens if it is wrong.

Say the window, who pays return postage, whether it must be unused, and how long a refund takes.

A clear policy sells more than a generous one stated vaguely, because certainty is what is being sought.

And a small maker with a genuinely strict policy is better off saying so than leaving it unwritten.

Say who ships it and how

Which is a detail that changes whether somebody orders a bulky item at all.

Name the carrier, say whether a signature is required, and say whether anything larger goes by freight rather than parcel.

Somebody who is out during the day needs to know whether a missed delivery means a depot trip across town, and that alone decides some purchases.

Where you offer collection, say the address, the hours, and how quickly an order is ready, since local buyers frequently prefer it and cannot tell whether it exists.

For anything heavy, say plainly whether it arrives at the kerb or comes inside, which is the question every furniture buyer asks and almost no small shop answers.

The counter-case within the site

Everything else here is strong.

The photography is excellent, the descriptions include dimensions and materials, the prices are clear, and the checkout itself is short.

This is a shop built by somebody who understood the product and not the buying process.

And a maker selling one product to a local audience who collect in person has genuinely little to write.

Even then, one line saying collection only prevents the order that cannot be fulfilled.

Somebody two provinces away who finds your product will otherwise try to buy it.

What to change

1. Write the shipping page.
2. Answer the four questions.
3. Separate dispatch from transit.
4. Add a one-line summary to product pages.
5. Link to the detail.
6. State the international answer.
7. Put returns on the same page.

Step four is where the return is, since the decision to buy happens on the product page and the shipping page is only read by people who have already decided to look.

The cost timing question is covered in showing shipping cost before checkout.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.