A subscription business with two thousand customers receives the same question several hundred times a month. When is it coming.
Nobody is being unreasonable. The answer exists in someone's head and in a fulfilment schedule, and nowhere a subscriber can see it.
The checklist
Publish these and the volume collapses.
1. The shipping schedule
Which day of the month orders are picked, which day they ship and roughly when they arrive. Subscribers plan around it and will stop asking once they know.
2. The relationship to the billing date
That the charge happens on one date and shipping happens on another, with the gap explained. Subscribers see a charge and expect a parcel the next day.
3. The cut-off for changes
The last date an address, size, preference or skip can be changed before the box is packed. This is the most useful date in the whole cycle.
4. Delivery timescales by destination
Domestic, remote areas and international, separately. Subscribers in slower destinations assume something has gone wrong every month.
5. What happens when nobody is home
Whether it fits a letterbox, whether it is left in a safe place, whether a signature is needed and what the carrier does. Box dimensions matter enormously here.
6. How tracking works
When it is sent, where to find it and what to do if it does not update. Subscribers panic at a tracking number that has not moved in two days.
7. What counts as late
The point at which a subscriber should contact you rather than wait. Publishing it stops enquiries on day two and catches genuine problems on day ten.
8. What happens to a missed or lost box
Whether it is replaced, whether a claim is needed first and how long it takes. This policy decides whether a lost box costs you a customer.
9. Holiday and seasonal changes
Which cycles shift around holidays, and by how much. Publishing it in advance prevents a wave of contact in the busiest weeks.
10. How to pause around a trip
Subscribers going away want to skip rather than cancel, and a pause option presented at the right moment retains a customer who would otherwise leave entirely.
11. What a gift recipient sees
Gift boxes have their own timing questions, as covered in gifting and recipient questions on subscription sites.
11b. Whether the address can change mid-cycle
Subscribers move, go travelling and send boxes to a different address for a month. Publishing how an address is changed, by when, and what happens if the change arrives after packing prevents a parcel following someone to a house they no longer live in and a support conversation nobody can fix.
12. Where the information lives
In the account, in every confirmation and on a page. Not only in a welcome email from fourteen months ago.
13. Answer it automatically
Delivery timing is the ideal question for an assistant to handle at any hour, and the answers can be drafted quickly with the AI reply generator. The wider anxiety is described in delivery date anxiety and how to answer it before checkout.
Getting started
Publish your shipping schedule, change cut-off and what counts as late, then answer delivery questions at any hour. SpideyChat for ecommerce answers from your published pages, much as described in an AI assistant for a subscription business. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.