Delivery times you can actually promise

You wrote "3 to 5 days" because everyone writes 3 to 5 days. It's day eight, the buyer has messaged twice, and the parcel left your house on Thursday.

The fix isn't a faster courier. It's that you were quoting one clock when there are two. Your handling time, from order to the parcel leaving your hands, is entirely yours and it's usually the bigger half. The courier's transit time starts after that. Add them, add a buffer, and quote the total as a date rather than a range. A seller who ships within 24 hours and quotes a five-day window looks better than one who ships in three days and quotes three.

Tomás, who roasts coffee in Denver and sells 12oz bags at $19, went from four or five late-delivery complaints a month to under one. He didn't ship a single parcel faster. He changed the sentence on his product page, and the worked numbers for that are further down.

Two clocks, and most sellers only count one

Clock	Who controls it	Typical for a small seller
Handling: order to dispatch	You	1 to 3 working days, and much longer than you think
Transit: dispatch to doorstep	The courier	Whatever their service says, plus a bit
Buffer	You, deliberately	1 to 2 days
Promise		Handling + transit + buffer

The courier's "2-day service" describes the second row only. It's also a median, not a guarantee, unless you paid for a guaranteed service and can point at the clause.

Go and measure your handling time before you do anything else. Open your last twenty orders, note the timestamp the order came in and the timestamp on the shipping label, and count working days. Almost everyone finds it's a day longer than they'd have said.

The Friday problem

Here's where the measurement gets ugly. An order placed at 6:10pm on Friday doesn't get packed Friday. It doesn't get collected Saturday. It sits until Monday, ships Monday afternoon, and starts moving Tuesday.

That's four days of handling on an order you'd describe as "shipped next working day", and weekend orders are frequently a third of the week's volume because that's when people are on their phones.

Three ways to deal with it, in order of how much they help:

1. Say your cut-off out loud. "Orders placed after 2pm ship the next working day. Orders placed Friday afternoon ship Monday." One sentence, on the product page.
2. Quote in working days, and say so. "3 to 5 working days" is a materially different promise from "3 to 5 days", and buyers do read the word.
3. Do a Saturday morning pack if your volume justifies it, and say that too, because it's a genuine selling point.

The cut-off sentence is the highest-return thing in this article. It costs nothing, it takes ten seconds to write, and it removes the single most common reason buyers think you're late when you aren't.

Getting a transit number you can trust

Take the courier's stated transit time. Then add a day.

Not because couriers lie, but because their number is what happens on a normal Wednesday to an easy address. The distribution has a long right tail, and everything you're worried about lives in that tail: the missed collection, the hub that floods, the address that needs a second attempt, the week before a public holiday.

If you've shipped fifty parcels, you have better data than the courier's marketing page. Pull the dispatch date and the delivery date for all fifty, work out the gap, and look at the slowest five rather than the average. Your promise should cover the slowest five. The average is the number that gets you complaints from one buyer in six.

How much buffer, and where to put it

Buffer isn't padding for its own sake. Match it to the actual risk:

Situation	Buffer to add
Stock on the shelf, one courier, local	1 day
Stock on the shelf, national	1 to 2 days
Made to order	Your build time, doubled for the first month you measure it
Anything dropped from a supplier	2 to 3 days, because you don't control their handling
Peak season	3 days minimum, and a published last-order date
A product you've never shipped before	2 days, until you have ten data points

Put the buffer in the handling side, not the transit side, because that's the part you can actually make up. A buyer whose parcel arrives two days early thinks you're excellent. A buyer whose parcel arrives on the promised day thinks nothing at all. Those are the only two outcomes worth designing for.

Dates beat ranges

"3 to 5 working days" makes the buyer do arithmetic, and they'll do it wrong, and they'll do it in your favour never.

"Arrives Tuesday 11 August to Thursday 13 August" needs no arithmetic and can be checked against a calendar. It's also harder for you to write, which is the point: writing a date forces you to count the weekend.

If your shop can only carry a text estimate rather than a calculated date, write the estimate so the counting is done: "Ships within 2 working days. Most orders arrive 4 to 6 working days after you order." Then repeat it in the order confirmation with the actual dates typed in. That confirmation is where the promise really lands, and what else belongs in it is covered in how to write an order confirmation.

A range the buyer has to interpret is a promise you haven't made.

Made to order and pre-order are a different shape

If you're building the thing after the order, ranges break down completely, because your queue length changes daily. A "2 to 3 week" promise made when you had four orders in the queue is a lie by the time you have nineteen.

Promise a ship-by date instead, and recalculate it as the queue grows.

Made to order. Yours ships by Friday 4 September. If I get ahead, it'll be sooner and I'll tell you.

Then hold a real queue, in whatever you use, in the order the money arrived. And when the queue gets long enough that the ship-by date is more than about four weeks out, close orders or raise the price. Both are better than a queue you're quietly falling behind on.

For anything where the buyer is waiting a long time, one short message at the halfway point does an enormous amount of work. Not an apology, not a status page. Just: "Yours is cut and in the dye bath, still on track for the 4th."

What to say when you're going to be late

Say it before the deadline, not after. That's the whole rule and it's the one people get wrong, because telling someone early feels like admitting failure and telling them late feels like it might not be necessary.

A buyer told on day three that it'll be day nine is mildly disappointed. The same buyer, discovering on day six that nothing has moved, is angry, and it's the same delay.

Hi Sam, quick update before you have to ask. Your order hasn't shipped yet, the roaster's down and the part comes Thursday. It'll go out Friday and land Monday or Tuesday. If that's too late, say so and I'll refund it now, no problem.

Three things in there. A new date. A reason, briefly, without a paragraph of explanation. And an exit, offered by you before they have to ask for it. The exit is what makes people stay.

Peak season and the delivery cliff

Around Christmas, Mother's Day, Valentine's and any local festival rush, transit times stretch and your handling time stretches at the same time because your volume triples. Both clocks slip together, which is why peak feels so much worse than the numbers suggest.

The fix is a published last-order date, worked backwards from the courier's own cut-off, minus your handling time, minus a two-day buffer. Then stop. Take the orders after that date if you like, but say clearly that they'll arrive after the day, and make people tick a box that says they know.

That's a whole season's planning in itself and it's covered in Christmas orders without the chaos.

Worked example: Tomás, coffee, Denver

Tomás roasts about 90 bags of coffee a week in Denver, sells 12oz bags at $19, and roasts on Tuesdays and Fridays. He was quoting "ships in 1 to 2 days, arrives in 3 to 5".

The problem: an order placed Tuesday afternoon missed Tuesday's roast, waited for Friday, shipped Friday evening, and got collected Monday. That's six days before it moved, on a promise of two, and coffee buyers care about roast dates more than almost any other category.

He counted his last thirty orders and found a real handling time ranging from 1 to 6 days, with an average of 3.1. His transit was 2 to 4 days domestically, with two of thirty taking 6.

What he changed:

1. Published the roast schedule. "Roasted Tuesdays and Fridays. Order by 10am on roast day and yours goes out the same afternoon."
2. Quoted a ship date, not a handling time. The product page now says which roast day the next order will make.
3. Moved dispatch to the roast day itself rather than the morning after, which cost him an hour of evening work twice a week.
4. Quoted 5 to 8 days total where he'd been quoting 3 to 5.

Complaints about delivery time went from four or five a month to under one. His actual delivery times barely moved. The change was almost entirely in what he'd said would happen, and the roast schedule turned out to be a selling point rather than an excuse.

The number that surprised him: 22 of 30 orders had been arriving inside his old 3 to 5 day promise all along. The whole problem was the eight that didn't, and every one of those was a weekend or a missed roast day.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Each delivery method carries a free-text estimate that the buyer sees at checkout, so "Ships Tuesdays and Fridays, arrives in 5 to 8 working days" can sit right next to the fee. The method the buyer picked is copied onto the order, so a later rename or rate change can't rewrite what someone was told. Orders move through new, confirmed, shipped, completed, cancelled and refunded, and the shipped date is stamped when you set it.

The limitation, and it's a plain one: the estimate is a piece of text. Nothing calculates it. Nothing knows about your cut-off, your weekend, or the fact that today is a public holiday. Nothing counts down, nothing turns an order red when it's been sitting at confirmed for six days, and nothing emails the buyer to say you're running late. If a delivery date has to be computed per order and monitored automatically, Sailo isn't doing that for you.

For a shop doing 90 orders a week, a text estimate you keep honest and a five-minute look at the order list each morning covers it. Set a reminder if you have to. The looking is the part that matters, and no software does it on your behalf here.

Do this today

Open your last twenty orders and count the working days between the order and the shipping label. Take the slowest three, not the average. That number is your real handling time, and it's probably not what's on your product page.

Then write two sentences and publish them: your cut-off time, and your total promise as a range of working days with the word "working" in it. Update the estimate on each delivery method to match. If the promise you end up with feels slow, the fix is your handling process rather than your wording, and the money side of the same decision is in how to work out delivery charges.

Getting this right upfront also prevents most of the arguments that come later, which is the same principle as setting expectations before the sale. And for the day a promise is broken by something genuinely outside your control, what to do when a parcel goes missing is the next one to read.