So now it's time to start talking about shipping and handling, because one of the things I can absolutely
guarantee is that you will get a lot of questions from your customers concerning shipping times.
And so it's therefore really important that we display our policy clearly on our website.
And in relation to that, I get asked by students a lot.
Won't customers be put off by longer shipping times?
Well, already 10 to 15 days really isn't a long shipping time because typically when they're referring
to long shipping times, they're looking at products on Ali that are going to take 1 to 2 months to
ship.
But of course, we've already looked at that and we know how to avoid it.
But with that said, the key point here, and this is super important, you must let your customers
know up front how long their shipping is going to take.
You will discover that as long as you let them know before, you will have very few problems.
The problems come when you don't let them know.
When you somehow hide the actual information, and then when they're asking where their product is,
you say, oh yeah, by the way, it's going to be 10 to 15 days.
That is a situation you do not want.
You want to be upfront with your policy.
So how do we do that?
Well, you can see them already over here on online store and pages.
And what we're going to do is create another page, a shipping and handling page, which is clearly
going to state our policy.
So to do that go over to add page, give it the title of shipping and handling and then come down to
the content and add in this text.
And just in case you're wondering where did that text come from?
Well, you'll actually find it in the resources section of this lecture.
So all you'll need to do is to copy and paste it into the content section yourself.
Okay.
So now let me read this content to you.
So it says the shipment of your product is our highest priority.
And every day we dispatch hundreds of products to satisfied customers across the world.
However, because the majority of our warehouses are internationally based, which is absolutely the
case, our shipping and handling times can vary and we are therefore unable to offer next day delivery.
And so straight away we're managing the expectation, and then we go into what the delivery times are
actually likely to be, starting with the processing time, which is basically the time required to
get the package ready, which we state could take 1 to 4 days, and then the shipping time where you
can see we've written that it will typically take 10 to 15 days, which if you add those up, would
give you a total of 19 days.
And therefore at this point you might be saying to yourself, well, hang on a second.
I thought you said the overall time was going to be 15 days.
And the fact is, in reality it will be.
Let me explain why.
Well, it's because common practice amongst suppliers is to always quote longer shipping times than
the actual package will take.
And the reason for this is twofold.
First of all, when the package arrives faster, it makes them look good.
And secondly, it massively reduces the number of queries and complaints that are likely to get.
And what we're doing here is exactly the same thing.
We are managing the expectation by saying that it could take up to 19 days, but in reality it will
be much faster than that.
And if you're in any doubt, I suggest you go on either a dropshipping or AliExpress.
Order a product yourself, and I can almost guarantee that you will receive it considerably faster than
the times that the supplier is quoting.
And then to the third and final paragraph where we talk about tracking.
And here it says as soon as your order is shipped, you will receive a confirmation email containing
a tracking number, allowing you to easily locate your product directly from our website at any time.
Then I put in here link to tracking page and then just an additional clause to cover ourselves.
We write.
Please note that while the majority of our shipping companies provide a tracking service, we cannot
guarantee it in all cases.
Now, of course, up to this point in the course, we haven't talked about tracking at all.
But later on, I'm going to show you that once the customer orders something from your site, how they
are going to receive a confirmation email and be able to easily track their order on your site.
And so by including this tracking clause here we are ready for that next step.
Okay, fantastic.
So let's go ahead and save this page.
Because now what we want to do is to add this shipping and handling page to our menu underneath the
customer service.
So to do that we go over to navigation.
Click on the main menu, scroll down to find the customer service.
We'll open this up, scroll down a little bit further and then click on here where it says Add Menu
item to Customer Service.
The name of course is going to be Shipping and Handling, and we will link that to our newly created
shipping and handling page, adding it in and clicking on save.
If I now open up the store and go to the customer service menu, here is our newly created shipping
and handling page.
And then, just to finish off this lecture at the beginning of the lecture, I talked about how you're
likely to get a lot of questions from your customers about how long their package is going to take to
arrive.
In other words.
It's a frequently asked question, so it would be a perfect addition to our Frequently Asked Questions
page.
Now, maybe you've already added in a couple of frequently asked questions, or maybe it's blank.
But whatever the case, let's create a frequently asked question for shipping and handling.
So going back to admin, we'll go over to pages, click on the Frequently Asked questions, and then
in the content I will put how long will my order take to arrive.
And for the answer I'm going to put for information concerning our shipping times, please visit our
shipping and handling page.
And then for this part here where it says, please visit our shipping and Handling page.
We want to make that a link so that they click on it and go directly to the shipping and handling page
itself.
And to do that you can see that I've already highlighted it.
And so I'll then need to come up to these three little dots here.
Click on them and select this little insert link icon.
Then for the link title I'm going to put the exact text.
So please visit our shipping and handling page.
And then in order to link it to the page, I need the URL of the page itself and that we can find by
going to the site.
You can see I'm on the page of course, and therefore all I need to do is to highlight the URL, copy
it, go back to admin and paste it in and then click on insert link.
I can then save it and then let's head back to the site to actually test it out.
So coming over to Customer service I'll click on FAQ here.
Now is my very first FAQ.
How long will my order take to arrive?
And when I click on this link, it takes my customer straight to my shipping and handling page, which
explains everything that they need to know.