Naming a flat delivery fee, and stating it without apologising
Buyers do not mind paying postage. They mind being surprised by it. Here is how to set a flat delivery fee and show it before payment.
The product is photographed, the description is written, the price is set. Then you reach the delivery fee field and stop. Four feels like a lot to ask on top of the thing they already wanted. Two feels safer. Zero feels safest of all, right up until the end of the month, when you notice you have been posting parcels at your own expense and calling it marketing.
Why that field is harder to fill in than the price field
Postage is genuinely variable. Weight, box size, destination, whether you want a tracked service, whether the thing is fragile enough to need bubble wrap and a bigger box. A flat fee takes all of that and squashes it into one number that has to be right often enough to work. That is a real problem, not a confidence problem, and it deserves ten minutes with a set of scales rather than a shrug.
The second difficulty is quieter. A delivery fee makes the total bigger, and you can see the total. You imagine someone reading the number and closing the tab. So you either bury the cost inside the price, where it distorts your pricing for every buyer, or you leave it off entirely and quietly subsidise every order out of your own pocket.
Here is the honest part. Some orders will cost more to post than you collected. That is not a broken system. That is what the word flat means, and it is the trade you accept in exchange for a number the buyer can read in one second instead of a quote you have to work out by hand.
What the buyer sees, and when they see it
The complaint people make about postage is almost never about the amount. It is about the moment. A fee that shows up on the product page reads as information. The same fee appearing after the card details reads as a trick. store.fan puts the delivery fee on the page before payment starts, and keeps it visible as its own line, so nothing about the total is a reveal.
| The usual experience | With store.fan |
|---|---|
| Postage is added at the final step, after the buyer has committed | The flat delivery fee is shown before payment, as a separate line |
| "Message me for postage costs" sits in the description | A number the buyer can read without contacting you |
| A discount code quietly wipes out the postage as well as the margin | The code applies to the product price; the delivery fee stays as you set it |
| The address arrives later by email, half of it missing | A full address form at checkout, 250 countries, with official region lists for 33 of them and districts in Turkey |
| The buyer assumes tracking is included because they paid a fee | You decide what the fee covers and say so in your own words on the page |
Setting the number, in order
Do the arithmetic before you open the dashboard, because the field is the easy part. You are looking for the true cost of the order you send most often, not the cheapest one you have ever sent.
- 1Weigh and box one real order. Write down the postage, the box, the padding, the tape and the printer ink. Most people forget everything after the postage.
- 2Decide which destinations you will actually post to, and say it plainly. "UK only" is a perfectly respectable sentence.
- 3In your store.fan dashboard, create the product as a physical item so the checkout collects a full delivery address rather than just an email.
- 4Enter one flat delivery fee. You name the number; it appears as its own line rather than being folded invisibly into the price.
- 5Add one sentence to the description covering where you post to, how long you take to pack, and whether the service is tracked.
- 6Buy your own product with a real card and read the page as a stranger would. If the total never changes after the moment you decide, you have got it right.
A worked example, with the arithmetic showing
Say you make ceramic mugs and sell them at 34. A padded box costs you 60p, second-class postage on that weight is around 4.20, and tape and a printed label take it to roughly 5.00 all in. Set the fee at 5 and you are square. Set it at 4 and you are choosing to absorb a pound per order, which is a marketing decision, not an accident, as long as you know you are making it.
Now the awkward case. The same mug to Germany might cost 11 to post. A single flat fee cannot be right for both. You have three honest options: post domestically only and say so, set the fee where the average of your real orders lands, or price the mug so that the occasional expensive parcel is survivable. All three are fine. Pretending the difference does not exist is the only one that is not.
If you make something you post yourself, you can have a page with a real address form and a stated delivery fee on it this afternoon.
Start your free storeThe mistake almost everyone makes first
They apologise. The description ends with something like "sorry, postage is extra", and that sentence does more damage than the fee ever could. It tells the buyer the charge is unreasonable and that you agree with them. Compare it with "Delivery is 5 anywhere in the UK, posted within two working days." Same money, no apology, and one fewer message in your inbox. The second mistake is baking postage into the price and then running a discount code, which takes your margin and your postage in the same click. Keeping the fee separate is what stops that happening, and it is worth reading the frequently asked questions on how codes and fees interact before your first sale.
You can, and for a single lightweight item posted to one country it often reads better. The catch is discounts: if the postage lives inside the price, every code you run cuts into it. Keeping it separate means the code takes what you intended and nothing more.
A flat fee is an average, so narrow the range it has to cover. Either restrict where you post, or set the fee for the destinations that make up most of your orders and treat the rare expensive parcel as a cost of doing business.
No. Discount codes apply to the product price. The delivery fee you named survives the code, which is the behaviour you want when the money is going straight back out to the post office.
That is entirely your call, but be specific about it. store.fan does not generate carrier labels or tracking numbers, so whatever service you buy is the service the buyer gets. Write it on the page and the question stops arriving in your messages.
A delivery fee is not a charge you have to win an argument about. It is a fact about how the object gets from your table to theirs, and buyers are far more comfortable with facts than with vagueness. State it early, keep it separate from the price, and let the page answer the question so you do not have to. If you want to see what the physical product setup looks like alongside the other nine things you can sell on the same page, the features overview walks through it, and every plan takes 0% platform fee on the sale itself, which you can check on the pricing page.
Put the postage on the page instead of in your messages, and see how many fewer questions you get.
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