Shipping Time

Shopping online can be stressful at times. You don’t get to immediately take your purchases home with you. With brick-and-mortar stores, even bulky purchases like furniture get delivered in a matter of hours. With online shopping, your purchases never get to you that fast.

Amazon has Prime Now but that is the exception rather than the rule. Besides, a small store would have a hard time trying to replicate Amazon’s logistics prowess or the market reach that allows them to make two-hour deliveries. With most purchases delivery takes a few days and sometimes weeks.

Many e-commerce customers have become accustomed to waiting a couple of days for a delivery. It’s the weeks-long waits that are problematic.

Since many customers are antsy about long delivery times, providing shipping information somewhere easily accessible like the product detail page is a great way to deal with the issue.

Shipping Costs

Providing shipping cost estimates is also important as many customers won’t enjoy paying a shipping fee that amounts to a significant portion of the order value. If you offer free shipping, this is a great opportunity to toot your horn.

Some stores show shipping costs at checkout instead of the product detail page but this is not advisable if your shipping costs are specially high. Customers are then more likely to feel that you’re trying to pull a fast one.

Returns

When we buy stuff like clothing from physical stores, we touch the fabric to feel if it’s right and try it on to see if it fits. We don’t get to do that with online purchases and this increases the likelihood of ending up with a product that doesn’t meet our expectations.

This is where the return policy comes in and it’s so important that 10% of people tested by Baymard won’t shop in a store if the return policy is too restrictive or too complicated. If you buy a shirt that doesn’t fit, you should be able to return it and so should your customers.

You should have easily accessible direct links to your return policy, preferably in the footer.