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How far your delivery reaches, and what happens past that line
By the end, you'll know how far your business delivers, who handles each leg, and what you tell the customer who falls outside the map.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
An order comes in from across town, twenty or thirty minutes by car. If you say yes, half your morning goes into the drive. If you say no, you lose a sale you already had.
Before deciding how much to charge for shipping, there's something more basic. How far you go yourself, how far a courier goes, and at what point the answer is that delivery doesn't reach there, or the customer has to come pick it up. That line doesn't get drawn with the order already in hand, when the customer is waiting for an answer and every minute counts. It gets drawn once, with the map in front of you, calmly, and it stays written on your website so you never have to second-guess it and the customer never has to ask.
Three zones, not one border
The question of how far you deliver can sound like a single line on the map: inside, yes; outside, no. But a business that delivers well doesn't draw a border. It draws three concentric zones, and each one works differently.
The first is the area you or someone on your team covers without it being a special trip: on the way to another delivery, in a lull in the morning, or because it's on your way home. Think of the bakery that delivers orders on the next block without taking the car, or the salon that brings hair dye to the woman two blocks over, between appointments.
The second is the area where it's not worth it for you to go yourself anymore, but a courier can handle it in one trip: the other side of town, the industrial park, the neighborhood that would take you forty minutes round trip. The third is whatever's left outside those two. Nobody delivers there, not you, not the courier. The customer picks up, or doesn't buy.
These three zones don't come from a hunch or a quick glance at the map. They come from measuring, using data from your own week, not what you think it takes.
- 1Mark the radius you cover yourself
Take five or six typical orders from the week and time the actual drive, not the one you picture from memory. If delivering it adds less than fifteen minutes to a route you were already running, that distance is your first zone: self-delivery, cheap or free. If most of your orders fall inside that radius, your business runs on self-delivery by default, and everything else is the exception. - 2Mark the courier radius
From there, ask a local courier service or a delivery app what they charge for a typical trip within your city. You don't need to lock in a contract yet, just a ballpark rate for two or three different distances. That rate, passed on to the customer, defines your second zone: it gets delivered, but at a cost you're not covering out of your own pocket. - 3Mark where it ends, without hesitation
The rest gets decided, and decided without hesitation: outside those two zones, the order gets picked up wherever you say, or it doesn't sell there. Saying it clearly avoids the half-finished order you don't know how to solve later, the one you accept at ten at night over WhatsApp and by nine the next morning you still don't know who's delivering it.
Who covers each zone
- You control the exact delivery time
- No extra cost to pass on to the customer
- Every delivery eats into your business time
- You pay a per-trip rate you pass on
- Your time is free to serve customers or produce
- You lose control over the exact time
Which one do I pick: If your day has dead time between appointments or deliveries, handle it yourself while the volume is low. Once delivering starts taking more than an hour a day, hand it off to a courier even if your margin drops: the time you get back is worth more than those dollars. And if you have ten orders in that window one month and thirty the next, you don't have to pick one method forever: you can handle deliveries yourself up to a certain volume and hand off the rest to a courier as soon as it spikes.
What happens if you cave once
This is where most people let their guard down. You've already drawn your three zones, lined up the courier, got the line ready on your site. Then an order comes in from outside the map, from a customer who insists, or who simply didn't check the zone before paying. It's tempting to say yes, just this once, so you don't lose the sale or look bad.
How to say it on your site
The sentence you put on your shipping page, or in your website's footer, has to answer this without the customer needing to message you to ask. It has to be read before checkout, not after. If your store charges a single flat shipping rate, that sentence is what sets the boundaries: confirm the courier zone surcharge with the customer by message before you prepare the order. And if you sell products that don't travel the same way, say on each product page how far you'll deliver it, because fresh flowers and candles don't deliver the same way.
- Your three delivery zones are mapped out: where you deliver yourself, where a courier delivers, and where delivery doesn't reach.
- You know who covers the middle zone, and at what volume you switch from delivering yourself to using a courier.
- You have the exact wording for your website, so every out-of-zone order isn't a brand-new decision each time.
- In the next lesson: the exact amount you charge for each zone.
Cases to decide
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A customer 5 miles away asks you to deliver the order yourself so they can skip the courier surcharge.
Explain that this zone goes through the courier because it's no longer worth your time to deliver it yourself. If you give in without charging the surcharge, the next order at that distance will expect the same for free, and so will the one after that.
2. You've spent the last two weeks delivering the middle zone yourself because the local courier charges more than you expected, and now delivery is taking up an hour and a half of your day.
Switch to the courier even if it cuts into your margin: the time you free up is worth more than the cost difference, and that time goes back into serving customers or producing, which is what actually grows the business.
3. A customer outside all three zones pushes back because this is their second order, and the first time you made an exception.
Hold the line, or make the exception with the surcharge included. Never for free, because next time they'll ask for the same thing without paying extra, and the time after that too.
The rule is set, with or without a surcharge. What you don't have yet is the exact number: how much you charge in each zone, the figure that decides whether the customer finishes paying or closes the tab at the last step.
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NextThe exact number you charge for shipping