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Write down how far you deliver and how much each zone costs, before anyone has to ask
Have it written on your website, with the price and no gaps, exactly how far you deliver and how much it costs to reach each zone.
By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026
There's a corner of your website that's easy to leave blank until a customer asks over WhatsApp whether their order will actually reach them. Someone lands on your site with the order basically decided: a bouquet, a cake, a box of fruit. They go to enter the address and, right before paying, they stop short.
They wonder if it'll reach them. If they don't see it spelled out anywhere, the easiest thing for them to do is message you on WhatsApp to ask about their zip code.
And if it takes you half an hour to answer, they may have already gone to check out another store. Not knowing what they'll pay in total also kills sales: in a Baymard Institute study of online shoppers in the United States, leaving aside people who were just browsing, 12% abandoned their purchase partway through because they couldn't see or calculate the total order cost ahead of time.
The question isn't whether you deliver. It's how far, and how much it costs depending on the distance. Write it down once and the doubt is gone for good, for your customer and for you.
Decide the shape of your delivery zone before you write down a single zip code
Before you write anything down, decide how you're going to explain your zone. There are two ways to do it, and they're not interchangeable: one talks about distance, the other talks about exact boundaries.
Which one you choose depends on the shape of your business, not on which one sounds better. A flower shop downtown doesn't deliver the same way as a bakery in a small town with a few villages scattered around it.
- It's one sentence: we deliver up to 5 miles from the shop
- You don't need to memorize which zip code falls inside and which falls outside
- It breaks down at the edge: someone 5.1 miles away feels shut out over a couple hundred yards
- Zero doubt: the customer checks their zip code and has the answer in a second
- It works even if your zone has an odd shape: a river, a highway, an industrial park you don't cover
- It explains a single neighborhood just as well as fifteen different ones
- You have to sit down once and write out every code, one by one, without skipping any
Which one to pick: If you work in a city with clearly defined neighborhoods and zip codes, use the list, it's the one that doesn't leave gaps at the edges. If your area is a small town or a rural county with just a handful of different zip codes, a mile radius from a known landmark, the town square, the church, says the same thing with less text and without making anyone look up their own zip code.
What each stretch costs, not free shipping for everyone
Once you know how far you deliver, it's time to decide how much to charge for getting there. It's tempting to just copy what the shop next door does: always free shipping, or one flat rate for the whole map. Free is what customers run into most when shopping online: according to Spain's CNMC Household Panel, by the end of 2025, 83.2% of online shoppers in Spain didn't pay for shipping on the last package they received, and one of the main reasons was that the order was above a minimum amount. That said, nearly half of those packages were bought on Amazon: that's a habit the customer brings with them, not a reflection of your delivery costs.
But neither approach holds up once the order is three towns away. With always-free shipping, you lose money on every long delivery. With a flat rate, you overcharge the neighbor right across the street, who has every right to complain since their order barely crossed the road.
What works is splitting your delivery area into zones and setting a price for each one. You don't need more than four: nearby, the rest of the city, the surrounding towns, and a last zone for "outside this, let's talk." If your store only supports one shipping price, you have two options that don't run afoul of the law: charge everyone the price of the farthest zone you reach (and offset it with "free shipping over $X" for larger orders), or limit your delivery area to the zone that matches that price and say so clearly on your site; orders from outside that area get closed over WhatsApp, with the shipping price agreed on before you charge. What you can't do is charge a shipping fee on your site and then ask for a difference later: the law says a customer isn't required to pay a cost they didn't see before placing the order.
Think about the real cost of delivery, not just the distance. An order nine miles away on the highway can take you less time than one just a mile away through a pedestrian downtown full of no-entry streets. If you're making the deliveries yourself between store hours, that time is money too, even if you never write it down anywhere.
The exact text that goes on your site
With your zone and price decided, write it once and put it where people will read it before they pay: on the product page or your shipping page, and if your platform lets you add text there, right next to the buy button. It doesn't have to look pretty. It has to be complete, with every zip code listed, without leaving any loose ends to ask about later. If you sell to individual consumers, the law also requires this to be clear from the start: under Article 98 of Spain's General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users, an online store must state clearly and legibly, no later than the start of checkout, whether any delivery restrictions apply. And Article 97 adds that if you don't disclose shipping costs before the customer buys, they aren't required to pay them.
The zip code that keeps coming up and the one that never does
Your zip code list isn't something you write once and forget. Every few months, check which codes have actually placed orders and which never show up at all. If one on your list hasn't brought you a single order in a year, that's fine, leave it as is: it costs nothing to keep it written down.
The real problem runs the other way. If you start getting WhatsApp questions from a zip code that's not on your list, that's the sign your zone has fallen short. Add it with its price and you won't have to answer the same question twice.
- Your delivery zone decided: radius in miles or a list of zip codes, whichever fits your business best
- The price for every zone spelled out, not a "just ask us"
- The exact text for your shipping section, ready to paste onto your site
- The habit of checking every few months which zip codes are actually ordering
- With this settled, it's time to review what the rest of your site says, corner by corner
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. You run a bakery in a small town of four thousand people with two nearby villages, and nobody around there uses zip codes for everyday things. Radius in miles or a list of codes?
Mile radius from the town square. In a small area with just a handful of different zip codes, saying "within 4 miles" is shorter, and no one has to go look up what zip code their village has.
2. A customer orders a cake for an address that's two streets outside the zone you've written down. What do you do?
If your text already says "if your zip code isn't listed, message us and we'll see if we can reach you," you handle it case by case, with the shipping price agreed on before you charge, without having committed to anything up front. If it doesn't say that, you either turn down an order you could have handled, or accept one that costs you more than you planned, without ever deciding to.
3. You've had the delivery zone written out for six months, and you notice half the orders in the $6 tier always come from the same town, while another zip code in that tier has never ordered.
You don't change the tier price for one zip code: the price is based on real distance, not on the customer. But if that particular town orders a lot, it's a sign there's enough business there to consider, down the road, lowering its delivery fee as a hook.
The zone and the price are already written out, so nobody has to ask. Now they shouldn't have to go looking either: what matters is the order your website's sections appear in.
Sources
- Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of November 16, approving the consolidated text of the General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users and other supplementary laws. Official State Gazette (Boletín Oficial del Estado), consolidated text last updated February 28, 2026.
- Eight in Ten Online Shoppers Didn't Pay for Shipping on Their Last Order in 2025. National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC), Household Panel, June 5, 2026.
- 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026. Baymard Institute, updated September 22, 2025.
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