Valentine's Orders and the Shipping Cutoff

The order placed on Tuesday night

Valentine's Day is a week from today, on a Thursday. At eleven on Tuesday night, somebody will order a gift from your shop and choose standard shipping, because it is cheapest.

The checkout said three to seven business days, in small type. The customer read it as soon, and assumed you knew what next week was.

The parcel arrives the following Tuesday. On the fifteenth, you get the email.

Nothing went wrong in the warehouse. The site simply never said, in words the customer would notice, that Tuesday night was too late for that option.

Why the customer assumed

Shipping estimates are written in business days, and gift buyers think in dates. Three to seven business days needs a calendar to interpret, which nobody consults at eleven at night.

Weekends do not count as business days, which turns a Thursday deadline into a much earlier one than it looks.

And customers assume a shop selling Valentine's gifts has thought about Valentine's Day. It usually has, in the back room, but not on the product page.

What the cutoff notice has to say

• The last order date for each shipping method, as a date.
• The time of day, with the time zone.
• Where the date holds, since distant provinces take longer.
• Local pickup, with hours and the last day.
• Local delivery, if you offer it, and the area covered.
• What happens after the cutoff, in one plain sentence.

The second is the one usually missing. Order by Monday means the courier's afternoon collection to the shop, and Monday at eleven at night to the customer, who may also be three hours ahead in Ontario.

Working the dates out backwards

Start from the fourteenth and count back, one shipping method at a time.

Take the longest transit time your carrier quotes to the farthest place you ship, not the typical one. Add the time you need to pack and hand over an order, and skip the weekend.

Then add a day for February. Winter weather slows deliveries in parts of the country every year, and carriers are busier than usual in the week before the fourteenth.

What comes out is a list of dates, earlier than you would like. Publish those, not the hopeful ones.

Where the dates need to appear

A notice in one place is a notice most customers miss. The dates need to be wherever customers decide.

A strip across the top of every page catches people arriving on a product page from search or social media, and the Valentine's products can repeat it in their descriptions.

The checkout matters most, because that is where the shipping method is chosen. On most platforms, including Shopify and WooCommerce, each shipping option's name is a setting, so standard shipping can read: order by February 8 for Valentine's delivery.

The order confirmation email should repeat the expected arrival, so a customer who chose wrongly finds out while there is still time to change it.

After the cutoff

The cutoff is not the end of sales. It is the point where the promise changes, and the site has to change with it.

Some shops keep selling with a clear line: orders placed now arrive after the fourteenth. Others switch Valentine's items to pickup only, or remove the shipping options that can no longer arrive in time.

A gift card sent by email arrives instantly, which makes it the one thing a shop can still deliver on the thirteenth, if it is set up to sell them.

Whichever you choose, decide it now rather than on the twelfth, in a hurry, on the busiest days of the month.

A worked example

A small chocolate maker sells from its shop and ships across Canada through its online store.

Last February, it posted its shipping deadline on Instagram and nowhere else. The checkout offered standard and express shipping, each with a range of business days and no dates.

Orders placed on the eleventh and twelfth went by standard shipping and arrived the following week. The fifteenth brought a run of unhappy emails, several asking for refunds, from customers who had done nothing unreasonable.

This year, a strip on every page gives three dates: standard, express, and the last pickup in the shop on the fourteenth. The shipping options carry the dates in their names, and the confirmation email states the expected arrival.

After the express cutoff, shipping gives way to pickup and an emailed gift card.

Pickup and local delivery

Local customers are the ones a shop can still serve at the last minute, and the site should make that obvious.

Pickup needs the hours, the last day and where to go: the counter, the side door, the parking. Local delivery needs the area, named by neighbourhood or postal code, and the delivery window.

If local delivery is limited, cap it and say so when it is full. A sold-out notice disappoints one customer; a delivery that never comes disappoints two.

The email on the fifteenth

Some late arrivals will happen anyway, and the reply matters.

Where the notice was clear, a calm reply can point to it without scoring a point: say where the parcel is, when it will arrive, and what you can offer, such as refunding the shipping.

Where the shop missed its own date, say so and put it right generously. A customer who was promised the fourteenth deserves more than a link to the policy.

The counter-case

Some shops need less of this.

A shop whose products are not gifts, or whose customers mostly collect in person, can keep it to a line at checkout and a note on the pickup page.

Made-to-order businesses face the opposite problem: their real cutoff for Valentine's was weeks ago, and the notice belonged on the site in January.

Either way, any shop shipping something people want by a date needs that date published, by method, before customers have to guess.

This afternoon

1. Check transit times for every shipping method.
2. Set a last order date for each.
3. Put the dates in a strip on every page.
4. Rename the shipping options to include the dates.
5. Publish pickup hours and the last pickup day.
6. Decide what happens after the cutoff.
7. Take the strip down on the fifteenth.

Step four is the one that reaches every customer. Banners get scrolled past, but nobody pays without choosing a shipping option, and a date in its name is read at the exact moment it matters.

Taking seasonal notices down afterwards follows the same logic as holiday hours still showing in January.

Frequently asked questions

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