4 Things to Consider Before Choosing Shopify Local Delivery & Pickup

If you are a Shopify store owner considering multiple fulfillment options, it's worth pausing before you commit to a specific approach. Offering local delivery and store pickup gives customers more ways to get their products, and gives you a chance to reach more customers. But most merchants move into the setup without thinking about how it works for their business and end up with a configuration that's pure chaos and lose sales right from the start. 

Before setting up Shopify local delivery and pickup, decide how to approach it. Here are 5 questions worth thinking through before you start configuring it. 

1. How much should prep time and cutoffs vary across products and locations?

A single prep time for each product category sounds like a simple approach, but when it comes to reality, it never works. Imagine your store needs only 3 hours of preparation time for a minimal design custom cake but needs 5 hours for a bigger cake. But you configure all custom cakes with a preparation time of 4 hours (average time taken to make custom cakes). Now, one cake has plenty of time to prepare while the other is done with no time to spare. 

That’s because each product takes different prep time, and every other factor, including your store location and staff capacity, affects it. A small location with a limited kitchen staff and a bigger one with more hands to help shouldn't run on the same clock. 

So the question worth thinking about isn’t “what’s my prep time?” but “how much variation exists in my catalog? Will a single prep time actually work?” If your catalog holds small batches of similar products, then a single prep time works perfectly fine. But if you operate from multiple locations and a meaningfully bigger catalogue, product-level and location-level timing is the most practical solution.  

2. How much ongoing attention do closures and seasonal changes need?

Planning your closures and holidays in advance is essential, but so is reviewing them from time to time. Imagine your store is closed for Christmas or Thanksgiving or just a random local holiday, but customers are still able to order since the product is available on your website for same-day pickup. Instead of enjoying your day off, you are making calls to customers, rescheduling or cancelling orders. It gets even trickier when you have multiple locations, leaving customers with pickup slots that shouldn't be available.

A calendar set once at the start of the year works fine only if nothing about your schedule changes, but in most cases, it keeps changing. If you operate from multiple locations, then it's worth considering these simple questions: “How frequently do closures and working hours change between one location and the other? Is it worth giving each store independent ownership of its own calendar, or can one person reasonably manage all of them?” 

3. How much does the customer's real-world experience differ from what you might assume?

More often than not, merchants view the store only from the merchant’s POV and never from the customer’s POV. Imagine setting up your store for pickup and delivery, but when customers try to place an order, all they see is an error message, ‘not available at your location,’ while they live literally 500 meters away from your store. In other instances, they might not see pickup and delivery options at all. Merchants usually realize this weeks later; by the time you do, you have already lost potential customers and sales. 

This happens because merchants test the setup with a standard, one product, one location, and one payment method format. While customers rarely match that. They order from a range of addresses, mix pickup and shipped items in the same cart, and use whatever payment method is fastest for them. 

The question worth asking is "how different and varied is a customer’s experience of the store from what I do by default? How does my setup work for a customer using a payment method I don't personally use?" The gap between your perception of the flow and how customers actually experience it is often bigger than it seems, and it costs you in sales unless you close the gap in time.

4. What should delivery pricing actually be built around?

Offering free shipping or delivery sounds enticing for customers, but it can be bad for your business when margins are not protected. You might charge a flat fee for every order, but if it's too low, then you are losing money on long-distance deliveries, and if it is high, then you are essentially discouraging nearby customers from placing an order.

Here is what you should be considering before setting up your delivery fee: How much does distance, order size, or weight actually affect your delivery cost? Will a standard delivery fee work for all the ZIP codes you deliver to? At what point does a delivery become not worth offering at your current pricing model? 

The further the distance, the more you spend on delivery, including manual labour, fuel, and time. When you do not consider these before setting your delivery rates, you either lose your profit margin or you lose sales altogether.

Frequently asked questions

1. What should I look for in a Shopify pickup and delivery solution?

While choosing pickup and delivery options for your Shopify store, look for features such as preparation time and cutoff time based on product level rather than just one setup for all products. Ensure it offers blockout dates to manage store closures across multiple locations and comes with dynamic pricing options when it comes to local delivery. Flexible pricing based on distance, time, day, order value, and so on ensures you keep your margin safe. While Shopify’s native features cover basic needs, as your business grows and your needs become more complex, choose the best Shopify local delivery and pickup app that fits your business the best. 

2. Should every store location have the same pickup and delivery settings? 

No, pickup and delivery settings needn’t be the same for all your store locations if you operate from multiple locations. Based on your staffing level, order volume, customer footfall, and other aspects that affect your work schedule, you can have a different setup for each store.  

3. Should pickup, delivery, and shipping all be priced the same?

No. It is wise to keep your pickup fee free since customers directly come to the store to pick up the order, while you charge a reasonable rate for delivery and shipping. Each fulfillment method costs differently, and that should be taken into consideration while setting the rates. Offering dynamic and reasonable pricing for delivery and shipping will avoid cart abandonment.