A customer fills a basket with six bottles as a gift, reaches checkout and discovers the producer does not ship to her friend's address, that someone over a certain age must sign, and that nobody will be home on the delivery day.
She abandons the order. Every one of those facts could have appeared on the product page.
The checklist
Publish these and the failed deliveries and abandoned baskets both fall.
1. Exactly where you ship
Countries, regions and any areas excluded by carriers. Islands, remote postcodes and some destinations are routinely excluded and customers find out at the last step.
2. What verification happens at ordering
Whether age is checked at checkout, what is required and what happens if a check fails. Customers dislike surprises involving their identity documents.
3. What happens at delivery
That an adult must be present, what identification the driver may ask for and that the parcel cannot be left in a safe place or with a neighbour. This is the most common cause of a failed alcohol delivery.
4. What happens on a failed delivery
Redelivery attempts, collection options, how long a parcel is held and what happens if it returns to you. Customers need to know before they order, not afterwards.
5. Whether you can deliver to a workplace
Often the practical answer for someone who cannot be home, and equally often against a workplace policy. Saying it is possible helps a lot of customers.
6. Gift orders and recipients
Whether you ship to a third-party address, what the recipient must do, whether the invoice is included and how a gift message works, which overlaps with the care needed in club membership and subscription questions for wineries.
7. Packaging and breakages
How bottles are packed, what happens if something arrives broken, what evidence you need and how quickly it is resolved. Glass in the post worries people.
8. Delivery timescales and cut-offs
Dispatch days, transit times and the cut-off for a specific date. Drinks are bought for occasions and the date is often the whole point.
9. Shipping costs and free thresholds
By destination, with any surcharge for remote areas. Publishing the threshold increases order values and prevents checkout abandonment.
10. Temperature and seasonal restrictions
Some products should not travel in extreme conditions. Being honest about seasonal pauses protects the product and the customer's opinion of it.
11. Duty and import charges
For international orders, who pays, what a customer may be charged on arrival and that it is outside your control. Unexpected charges turn a gift into a grievance.
11b. Subscription and repeat shipments
A case sent every quarter raises all the same questions repeatedly, and the delivery problem compounds because nobody is home on a schedule. Explaining how subscribers change a delivery date, skip a shipment or nominate an alternative address turns the most valuable orders you take into the ones that fail least often.
12. Trade orders are different
Pallets, licences and delivery arrangements differ entirely, which is covered in trade and stockist enquiries for craft drinks producers.
13. Age restrictions apply elsewhere too
The same verification discipline appears in deposit, age and consent questions for tattoo studios, and the general approach is in how ecommerce chatbots handle shipping and returns questions.
Getting started
Publish your shipping destinations, verification process, delivery requirements and breakage policy, then answer before checkout at any hour. SpideyChat for drinks producers answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.