Separate delivery fee, or baked into the price? How to decide

You have typed £4.50 into the delivery fee field and deleted it twice. Baked in, the price looks high next to the version of the product that lives on your phone as a PDF. Charged separately, the total climbs at the last step and you picture someone closing the tab. Both instincts are right, which is why the decision feels stuck. It is not really a question about numbers. It is a question about what you are posting and who is buying it.

Two true things pulling in opposite directions

A price is a signal before it is a sum. £22 for a candle reads as one thing and £17 plus £5 reads as another, even though the buyer's card is charged the same. That is the argument for baking postage in: one number, one decision, nothing added at the end that feels like a surprise.

The counter-argument is that a baked-in price is a bet on your average parcel, and you place that bet before you know where the orders will come from. If most go down the road and one goes across an ocean, the far one eats the margin of the three before it. Separating the fee makes the cost of distance visible instead of absorbing it silently, and it keeps the product price honest as a price for the product.

The genuinely awkward middle is that neither approach can fully solve variability, because there is one flat delivery fee, not a rate table. You are choosing where to place a single line, not eliminating the problem. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a spreadsheet.

A decision table you can actually use

Rather than argue in the abstract, match the choice to the parcel. Both columns below describe things you can set in the same product editor on store.fan; the difference is which side of the total the postage sits on, and what happens when your destinations spread out. If you want to see the two versions side by side, build them both as drafts after you create an account and compare the checkout totals.

Run the test in an afternoon

You do not need a theory. You need two totals and a look at your own storefront. Work through this in order and the answer usually declares itself.

The same candle, priced both ways

Say a candle costs you £6.20 to make, £1.40 to pack, and between £3.20 and £8.90 to post depending on where it goes. Baked in, you might pick £26 and hope the mix stays local. If nine in ten orders are domestic, you clear roughly £18 on those and about £12 on the tenth. That is fine, and the checkout is as simple as it gets.

Split it and you might price the candle at £21 with a £4.50 delivery fee. The buyer pays £25.50, slightly less than before, and your domestic margin lands in the same neighbourhood while the far orders stop hurting. The interesting difference is what happens in a sale: knock 25% off, and the baked-in version loses £6.50 of which part was postage, while the split version discounts only the candle and leaves the £4.50 intact. Treat these figures as a worked method rather than a prediction — the point is the shape of the gap, not the digits.

The mistake most people make

The mistake is not picking the wrong column. It is saying nothing. A buyer who reaches the payment step with no idea whether postage is included reads the extra line as a trick, and a buyer who never sees a delivery fee still wonders when the thing will arrive. One sentence on the product page — what you post, how you post it, roughly how long you take — does more for conversion than either pricing model. You can see how the rest of the checkout is presented on the payments page.

Pick the column that matches the parcel in front of you, write the sentence that explains it, and move on to making the next thing. This decision is worth an afternoon, not a fortnight, and it is reversible in the time it takes to edit one field. If you are weighing up which plan you need before you start, the differences are set out on the pricing page.