The shipping day: a weekly rhythm for packing physical orders
You pack it and you post it, because store.fan never touches the parcel. Here is how to batch fulfilment into one day and price the delivery fee properly.
Three parcels are stacked by the door and one of them has been there since Tuesday. You know what is in it. You know the postcode. What you do not have is a slot in your week where posting things is simply what happens, so every order becomes its own small decision, taken badly, usually at the wrong hour of the evening.
The part nobody warns you about
Selling something physical is not harder than selling a file. It is a different shape of work. A digital download lands on a private order page the second payment clears, and if you replace the file later, everyone who already bought it gets the new version. Nothing about that needs your Thursday. A physical order does. You are the warehouse, the packing bench and the courier run, and none of that is visible in the dashboard.
The genuinely hard bit is not the packing. It is the unpredictability. Orders arrive in ones and twos across a week, each one arriving with a small pull on your attention, and the counter closes at half five. You end up doing a two-minute job eleven separate times, plus eleven trips back into the right frame of mind. That is where the resentment comes from, not the tape.
The other hard bit is addresses. store.fan collects a full delivery address at checkout across 250 countries, with official region lists for 33 of them and district-level detail for Turkey, so what reaches you is structured rather than a free-text line someone typed on a phone. That removes one whole category of failure. It does not remove the queue. You can read the full breakdown of what is collected on the physical goods feature page.
Order by order, or one shipping day
Most people fulfil reactively, because the first few orders genuinely are a two-minute job. The habit only becomes expensive at volume, and by then it feels normal. Here is the same week, run two ways.
| Order by order | One shipping day |
|---|---|
| A notification arrives and you stop whatever you were doing | Orders queue and you open them all together |
| Packaging is whatever happens to be in the cupboard | You buy one size of mailer, the size you actually use |
| Postage is guessed per parcel, sometimes at a loss | One flat delivery fee, set from what a real trip costs |
| Buyers message to ask when it will arrive | The product page says parcels go out every Thursday |
| Five trips to the post office in a week | One trip, one queue, one receipt for your records |
| Fulfilment feels endless, because it never ends | It finishes at four, and then it is finished |
Setting the product up so the day runs itself
Almost everything that makes a shipping day calm is decided once, when you create the product. Five minutes in the dashboard now saves an argument with yourself every week.
- 1Add a product and choose the physical type. That switches on full address collection at checkout, so you are never chasing a house number by email.
- 2Set your delivery fee. It is a flat amount you name, shown to the buyer before they pay, and it stays on the order even when a discount code is applied.
- 3Add order-form questions for anything that changes what goes in the box: size, colour, the name to write on a card. Short answer, long answer or multiple choice.
- 4Write the rhythm into the description, high up: "Parcels are posted every Thursday." One sentence does the work of a dozen replies.
- 5Open your storefront on a phone and buy from yourself. An address form is long by nature, so check that everything above it earns the scroll.
- 6Put the shipping day in your calendar as a recurring block with an end time, not as a reminder you can dismiss.
The night before
Ready for shipping day
0/5What a shipping day actually costs
Say you sell a print at £24 with a delivery fee of £4.50, and eleven orders come in over a week. On Thursday morning that is eleven boxes, one playlist and roughly ninety minutes including the walk. The maths worth doing is per parcel, not per month.
A rigid mailer is around 60p, the stiffener 30p, second-class postage on a light flat parcel around £2.95. That is £3.85 against a £4.50 fee, leaving 65p a parcel to cover the trip. Eleven parcels means £7.15 for ninety minutes of your time, which is not a wage. So either the fee moves to £5.50, or you accept that the trip is paid for by the product price and stop pretending otherwise. There is no platform fee taking a slice of either number on any plan, so what is left after Stripe's own card processing fees is genuinely yours, arriving in your own Stripe account. The pricing page spells out where the 0% applies.
A delivery fee is not a profit centre. It is the price of getting the thing out of your house without resenting it.
Set up a physical product, collect a proper address and name your own delivery fee before you sell a single one.
Start for freeThe mistake most people make
Free delivery, offered to look generous, then absorbed in silence. It works until the order comes from three countries away and the postage is more than your margin. The opposite mistake is pricing every parcel as though the buyer lives down the road. If you sell to 250 countries you will eventually post to one of them, so decide now whether you ship internationally at a higher fee, or say plainly in the description that you post domestically only. Both answers are fine. Not deciding is the expensive option, and the features overview shows what the checkout collects either way.
No. store.fan never touches the parcel and generates no carrier labels or tracking numbers. You buy postage from your own carrier and use the delivery address shown on the order.
It survives. The fee is shown before payment and stays on the order when a code is applied, so a promotion discounts the product rather than your postage. Discount codes themselves are a Pro feature.
Yes. Order-form questions can be short answer, long answer or multiple choice, and the answers arrive attached to the order so you have them on packing day.
No. Every plan, including Free, is 0% platform fee. Stripe's own card processing fees still apply, and payments go directly into your Stripe account rather than being held by store.fan.
A shipping day is not an efficiency trick. It is a boundary. Once posting things happens on Thursday, the rest of the week stops being interrupted by it, and the orders that arrive on Friday morning stop feeling like a demand. They are just next week's pile, and next week already has a slot for them.
Open a free page, list one physical product and let the checkout handle the addresses while you handle the boxes.
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