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Advanced Shipping
Advanced Shipping replaces vague promises like "within a few working days" with a concrete delivery date the shopper can actually plan around - shown live on every product page and every basket line - and lets you sell delivery-and-assembly services they choose per item.
It needs the Shop and Product Attributes modules installed.
- On a product page: "Delivery by Wednesday 29th of July", with a gentle countdown - "Order within 6 hours and 12 minutes to get it by then." When the cut-off passes, the date quietly rolls forward on its own.
- Also on a product page, the Product: Shipping options block shows the delivery services that product is offered before anything is added to the basket - the same ticked bar and switch chips the basket uses, because it is literally the same picker, so what each service costs and when each one lands is answered on the page the shopper is already reading. It carries a heading you can rename or empty, and it follows whichever basket picker style is set in Delivery settings. A choice made here is remembered for that product for the rest of the visit, moves that product's basket line straight away if it is already in the basket, and otherwise rides along onto the line the next add-to-cart creates - including when the shopper picks a different variation on the way, in which case a service that variation is not offered quietly falls back to your default rather than being honoured.
- On a product with variations, the block follows whichever combination the shopper is building. Before they have touched anything it offers every service any variation of that product carries - a shopper who has chosen nothing has ruled nothing out, so nothing is withheld from them yet. Each one is costed and dated at its slowest and dearest across the variations that carry it, so no price or date shown there can go up or slip once they choose. As choices come in the block narrows to the variations still matching them, and the moment a full combination is picked it asks again for that exact variation and shows its real services and dates. The answer always comes from the variations rather than the listing itself, since the variation is what actually goes in the basket - which also matters where your delivery services are priced by range and the range is set on the variations: without it, the listing has nothing to show at all.
- A service the shopper's own choices have ruled out is crossed out, not hidden - and only then. Nothing is struck through on a page nobody has touched: a service is only crossed out once a choice they made is what lost it, which is the only point at which there is anything to tell them. Once that happens, a second row appears under the live chips listing every other service you sell on that product, struck through, with its price and a line saying which choice does carry it: "Available in 120cm or 140cm", "Available With Arms". That line is worked out against what the shopper has already chosen, not against the range as a whole - so on a chair that offers express delivery on fourteen of its colours overall, but only four of them with the arms this shopper has picked, it names those four. Where one of their own earlier choices is what rules it out, it says which one to change instead, and where either of two would do it, it says "or" rather than sending them off to change both. It is the same courtesy the variation choices themselves pay a shopper who wants something the current combination cannot give them, and it means a two-person delivery you only offer on the wider desks is something they can find rather than something that silently is not there. Two options that move as a matched pair - a seat and back upholstered in the same material, say - are treated as the one choice they really are, so a chair whose express delivery sits on the all-black builds says "Available in Black Fabric or Black Leather" rather than naming only the one a single swap would reach. Nothing in that row can be clicked - it states what is on offer elsewhere in the range, it does not sell it - and where no single choice explains it, it simply reads "Not available on this choice". Where the combination they have settled on carries no service at all, that row appears on its own with nothing above it, so the page still says where the delivery went rather than going quiet.
- You can turn that row off entirely. In Delivery settings, Services this choice cannot have is ticked by default, which is everything described above. Untick it and a product page simply never mentions a service the chosen variation is not offered - no greyed-out names, no "available in" line, only the services that combination can actually be bought with. Worth doing if your range is broad enough that the row reads as a list of things the shopper cannot have rather than a nudge towards something better.
- On a product card, in a category, a collection or one of your filter pages: "Delivery in as little as 4 days." under the price, and "Installation available." after it where installation is one of the services that product is offered. It is a floor rather than a promise for a particular version - the exact date for whichever one a shopper settles on is on the product page - and a product no delivery service reaches, or one your stock rules will not promise a date for, simply says nothing rather than guessing. See Putting the delivery line on your product cards below for how to add it.
- In the basket: each line states what it has already chosen - a ticked bar reading "Arrives by Thursday 6th of August", the service name beside it and the price on the right (Free, or what it adds). Every other service for that line sits underneath as a one-click chip - "Switch to: Installed by Thursday 13th +£25.95" - so the alternatives are visible without the shopper opening anything. Picking one updates the price the instant it is clicked - no waiting on a spinner - and the promised date follows a beat later once the server has confirmed the sums. A service's description (what it includes - delivered to the room of your choice, built, packaging taken away) appears in smaller text beneath the chosen bar, so the shopper knows what they are paying for without leaving the basket. A line with only one service simply states what happens and offers nothing to switch to.
- At the checkout, the Your order summary stops listing products and starts listing deliveries: one heading per arrival day, soonest first, with everything landing that day underneath it. A day whose items are all on one service takes the fuller heading - "Flat-pack - by Tuesday 25th of August" - and the per-item repetition of that same sentence disappears, having already been said above. A day carrying two different services keeps its items together and states the day alone, each product naming its own service beneath itself, because one heading can only honestly promise what all of them share. This needs a shop new enough to understand delivery groups; an older one simply lists each item with its own delivery line, exactly as before.
- On the basket's sticky checkout bar: "Everything gets to you by Friday" beside the item count - the last of the basket's own delivery dates, which is when the whole order has actually landed. It follows the shopper down a long basket, and it disappears when nothing in the basket has a delivery date to promise.
- Also in the basket, the Delivery: basket cut-off countdown block gives the whole lot one deadline - "Order within 5 hours and 12 minutes to keep these delivery dates." - and nothing else. The dates themselves already sit beside each line, so it does not repeat them. Drop the block above your basket lines to have it read as a heading over the Delivery column.
- That countdown appears only when every item in the basket shares the same cut-off. Mixed basket, mixed deadlines, and it stays quiet rather than pick one and be wrong about the rest. Items with no cut-off at all (pre-order) count as a mismatch, since there is no deadline to keep.
- The Delivery: whole-order upgrades block offers the basket things no single line can - "Get everything sooner +£13.90 (2 items) · first arrives Friday (was Thursday 6th of August)", or "Built or installed for you +£66.90 (3 items) · everything by Friday 11th Sep (was Friday 4th of September)". One click moves every affected line at once. It works out the offers from the services your items are actually offered, so there is nothing to configure: an upgrade only appears when it applies to at least two lines and the shopper is not already on it, and one it cannot put a firm price on is not offered at all rather than guessed at. Drop it under the countdown, above your basket lines. A basket with one item in it never shows the row - that item's own picker already offers everything this could.
- The Delivery: basket arrivals summary block goes underneath the basket lines - and if you split the basket into the Cart items and Cart totals blocks, this is the thing to put between them, so the dates are read before the money rather than after it - and answers "so when have I actually got everything?" - a heading reading "Everything arrives by Friday 4th of September", then one card per arrival date naming what turns up on it ("Flat-pack delivery by Thursday 6th of August - Task chair + Desk with storage"). It appears only when the basket is waiting on more than one date; with everything landing together, each line already says so beside itself. The footnote underneath is yours to edit, or to empty if you would rather not commit to confirming days by email. Show each arrival as picks how a card says what is in it: Item names writes them out as it always has, and Product photos shows the pictures instead, with the name and the chosen options on hover (or on a tap, on a phone). Photos suit a basket of long-winded variation names; a catalogue with no pictures in it is better off with the names, since a product without a photo gets a blank tile.
- The date and the chosen service are saved with the order exactly as quoted, so there is never any confusion later about what was promised.
Every "arrives by" date is spelled out in full - "Wednesday 29th of July" - because that is the line a shopper reads as a promise and an abbreviation is one more thing to decode. The tighter spots keep the short form on purpose: a switch chip and the sticky bar say "by Friday" inside the week, adding the date and then the month only as the distance makes it necessary.
Every date counts working days only - weekends and bank holidays are skipped.
Two ingredients, and that is the whole recipe:
- Dispatch clears. Your shop has one set of dispatch timing (in Delivery settings): a daily cut-off, the working days it takes to pick and pack, and which days the courier collects. Order before the cut-off on a ship day and it starts that day; otherwise the next working day. This part is the same whichever service the shopper picks.
- The service adds its delivery time. Each delivery service says how many working days it takes from dispatch to the door - a plain number, not an adjustment on top of something else. Standard might be 5, express 1, full installation 10.
Pre-order items dispatch on their pre-order date instead of the cut-off. An item out of stock and set to block simply makes no promise at all.
A product bought with options chosen (a colour, a headrest) counts as its main product for all of this: it uses the same category, supplier and ranges, so the basket shows the same delivery choices whichever options were picked. Its own stock level still decides stock-based dates.
The one exception is the range. If you have set range up as an option that varies per variation (rather than one range for the whole product), each variation uses its own range, and the basket shows the delivery choices for the exact variation picked. A product with a single range for the whole thing behaves as before.
Delivery services are the options a shopper picks in the basket - standard, express, delivered and built, full installation, and so on. Each one carries:
- a name and an optional shopper-facing description,
- its delivery time in working days,
- optionally a floor ("never sooner than") for services that need booking - a full installation is never sooner than, say, ten working days out however fast the van is,
- and its price rows.
Prices you type on a service row are recorded the same way your product prices are, and they are shown to shoppers the same way too: if Shop is set to show prices with tax included, the "+£4.95" on a delivery upgrade has the tax added on exactly as the item price beside it does. Nothing about what you charge changes - only what is printed.
A price row says where the service is offered and what it costs there. Rows can apply to everything, to one supplier, one category, or one value of your shipping attribute (a product attribute you nominate, e.g. Hyphen or Aero), and the most specific row that fits the product wins: shipping attribute beats category, category beats supplier, supplier beats the everywhere row. No matching row means the service simply is not offered on that product - which is also how you keep a service to one supplier: give it a single supplier row and nothing else.
A price row can also carry different timing for just that scope: tick "Different timing here" and fill in only what differs. So one Standard delivery service can be 5 working days for stocked ranges but 25 for a made-to-order one, and one Installation service can take ten days for most furniture but thirty for one awkward range - no second service with the same name, no mental arithmetic. Anything left blank keeps the service's usual timing, and setting "Never sooner than" to 0 on a row lifts the service's floor just there.
The services are listed in the order shoppers see them, and the arrows on each one move it up or down. That order does one more job: where a product is not offered your default service (the one nominated in Delivery settings), it starts on the highest service in this list that it is offered - so put the one you would rather sell nearer the top. A newly added service joins the bottom.
Every price row has an Edit button beside it, so a price rise or a longer lead time is a change in place rather than a remove and a retype. The one thing Edit does not change is where the row applies - a row is defined by its scope, so to move a price somewhere else, remove it and add a new one.
If a product falls under no service at all, it shows no delivery estimate - by design, not by accident.
In the basket each option spells out when it would arrive right there in its own label - "Standard Delivery by Monday (included)", "Express Delivery by Monday (+£4.95)" - so a shopper can weigh the dates against the prices without having to select each one in turn. Anything landing within the week shows just the weekday ("Monday"); past a week it adds the date ("Monday 3rd") so "Monday" can never be mistaken for the one three weeks off; past four weeks it adds the month too ("Monday 3rd Aug").
Go to Layouts > Shop > Product Card and drag in the Card: Delivery piece, under the price. Design the card once and every grid in the shop prints it: categories, collections, your filter pages, tag pages, the related and featured strips, and search results.
What it says is worked out from the delivery services that product is actually offered - the soonest date any of them could manage, counted from today with your cut-off, dispatch time, shipping days and bank holidays all taken into account. On a product sold in several versions the answer comes from the versions rather than the listing, for the same reason the product page's picker does.
The piece carries these settings:
-
Wording, with
{days}standing in for the figure. The default is "Delivery in as little as {days} days." If you would rather count in working days, say so in the wording and set Count the days as to match. Where the answer is a single day it reads "1 day", not "1 days". - Word that marks a service as installation and the line to add when one is offered. Both are yours to change: a shop that calls it Fitting, or Assembly, sets that here and the extra line follows.
- Text size, text colour - picked from your site palette, with a separate colour for dark mode - alignment, and the space above and below, each set on its own.
- Shrink the wording to fit on one line. Cards are narrow and the sentence is as long as the number in it, so on a four-across grid it can wrap where a two-across one would not. Switch this on and the line measures the card it landed in and takes the type down just far enough. It will not shrink past the smallest size you could have set by hand, so a sentence with nowhere left to go wraps as normal rather than being squeezed into something nobody can read.
If a product is missing its line, it has no delivery service reaching it. The Missing shipping rules tab under Tax & shipping lists exactly which products those are.
Some orders are placed today and paid for later. A bank transfer (or cash) is the obvious one: the shopper pays whenever they get round to it, which might be tomorrow or a fortnight on Thursday. Instant Bank Pay is the quieter one - the shopper authorises it there and then, but the money itself takes a working day or two to actually reach you. Either way, nothing leaves the warehouse until it lands, so a delivery date counted from the day they clicked is a promise you have no way of keeping.
Advanced Shipping handles that on its own, with nothing to switch on:
- At the checkout, choosing a method you have to go and pay by hand puts a line under it saying so: delivery dates start from the day the payment clears rather than today, and here is what the lead time on this basket actually is. It appears the moment the method is picked - which is when the shopper is deciding - rather than waiting until the rest of the form is filled in and the boxes are ticked.
- Until the money arrives, the order shows each item's delivery as a lead time instead of a date - "Standard Delivery - 5 working days from when your payment reaches us" - on the thank-you page, in the customer's account, and in your admin. No date is promised, because none can be. If the shop sends proforma invoices, the same lead time is printed against every line on the proforma, which is where the person deciding whether to pay actually reads it (see Shop → Proforma invoices).
- The moment the payment lands - you marking a transfer received, or the bank confirming an authorised payment has cleared - every line is re-dated from that day and reads as a proper date again. The confirmation email only goes out at that point anyway, so it carries the real date rather than a stale one.
The lead time honours the service the shopper actually bought, so an express or full-installation line keeps its own timing. Pre-order lines are left as dates throughout: their date comes from when the stock itself arrives, which paying sooner does not change.
Card and PayPal are effectively untouched: the money moves at the checkout, so the date the basket promised is the date the order keeps. Strictly they follow the same rule as everything else - an order is dated once it is paid for and not before - which only shows if a card payment fails or is abandoned, where the lead-time wording is the honest thing to leave behind anyway.
Everything lives on the shop's Tax & shipping page - Shop → Trading in the admin sidebar, then the Tax & shipping tab across the top. (It used to have a sidebar link of its own; the old link still works.) Alongside the shop's own tax and shipping tab you get four more tabs:
- Delivery services - your delivery-and-assembly options: name, description, delivery time, floor, and the price rows that say where each is offered.
- Missing shipping rules - every value of your shipping attribute that no delivery service prices, with how many live products use it, plus a second list of the values only some of your services price. Nothing here is broken: those products fall back to the category, supplier or everywhere price. It is simply the list of places where the fallback is deciding for you.
- Holidays - import the official bank-holiday calendar for your region (England & Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland). It refreshes itself weekly.
- Delivery settings - the shop-wide dispatch timing (cut-off, days to dispatch, ship days, with a live "an order placed now would dispatch…" preview so you can spot a wrong cut-off before a shopper does), which attribute is your shipping attribute (the one that usually means "range"), your holiday region, the default service shown before the shopper changes it, how the basket shows the picker: the chosen service with the rest as chips (the default), a compact dropdown, or radio buttons that list every option at once - and whether a product page names the services the chosen variation cannot have (on by default; untick it to show only what that variation can be bought with).
There is nothing to configure in your hosting - no keys, no environment variables. Set your dispatch timing, add your services, import the holidays, and you are away.
One small note on timing: to keep the storefront quick, the shop keeps a very short-lived copy of your services and prices (about ten seconds). An edit in the admin can therefore take up to ten seconds to show on product pages and in the basket - blink and you'll miss it, but it is not a bug.
Each order line keeps the date the customer was promised at the checkout, and the shop's orders list reads it back: an order nobody has dispatched yet shows Delivery due Wed 23 Sep in its Dispatch column, the soonest of its lines' "Arrives by" dates. Once a parcel is on its way with a delivery day booked, the courier's day takes over for whatever is in it. Nothing to switch on, and it covers every order already placed, not just new ones.
An order waiting on its payment shows no date, for the reason above: until the money lands the promise is a number of working days. When it lands and the line is re-dated, the new date is the one the list shows. See Shop for how the list picks the day.
From 0.1.42 the module publishes each product's delivery time - working days to send, then working days on the road - for any other module that wants it. It publishes nothing about who is asking, and needs no setting up.
From 0.1.46 it publishes the whole menu beside that headline: every service the product can actually be bought with, each with its own price and its own days.
The first taker is Google Shopping: install both and your product feed tells Google how long each product takes, so shoppers see "get it by Thursday" against your listings - and, if you switch it on there, what each delivery service costs. Nothing changes for a shop running Advanced Shipping on its own.
The second is the shop itself. Every product page carries a hidden description of itself for search engines and AI assistants, and with this module installed that description now lists every delivery service the item can be bought with, each with its charge and its days - free ones included. "Free, five days, or assembled by Thursday for £37.95" is the answer to the question a shopper actually asks, and until now it was on the page for people and nowhere a machine could read it. Nothing to switch on, and a shop without this module simply publishes nothing about delivery there. See Shop.
A listing answers for its variations. Where you scope delivery by range and the range sits on the variations rather than on the listing - which is how a catalogue imported by range usually ends up - the listing itself is in no range at all, and anything asking about it used to be told the shop does not deliver it. It now falls back to what its variations offer between them, exactly as the service picker on the page already did: every service any combination can be had with, each at the dearest price and the latest date among the ones carrying it. So nothing quoted against the listing gets dearer or later once a combination is chosen, and what a search engine reads matches what the page shows.
Earlier versions kept delivery rules (base timing per range, category or supplier) as a separate screen, with each service holding day adjustments on top, plus a per-product override tab. In practice that meant reading two screens and adding them up to know what a shopper would see. The two have been folded into one: dispatch timing moved to Delivery settings, every service now states its delivery time as a plain number of working days, and a price row overrides it outright where a range or category takes longer. Existing numbers were carried across exactly - what a shopper is promised does not change. The per-product override tab and the per-service supplier tie went with it (a supplier-scoped price row does the same job); the odd exception is now a range or category row rather than a buried per-product patch.