Allowing for non-shipping days and non-delivery service days for holiday shipping

Ask Me Anything Q&A Estimated Delivery Dates AMA
1

Hi,

We are trying to figure out whether Shop Promise estimated delivery date will account for

  1. Days we will not be shipping (can we set non-shipping days in the holiday period?) and

  2. Days that courier services do not deliver through the holidays, or where certain standard shipping services are past the courier’s last advised shipping date for pre-holiday delivery

We have had Shop Promise running for many months now but it still has not learned that we do not ship on Saturday/Sunday so a customer ordering from the west coast on Friday nights will be advised an ETA of Tuesday. Reality is that we dispatch Monday and it takes 4 days UPS ground and arrives Friday. This tells me that the holiday shipping advice is unlikely to be correct and customers need very specific advice this time of year when gifts are being purchased.

It would seem that this is all possible logic (ETA = next available shipping day (accounting for service level cut-off dates for destination zone) + historical transit time for this service to that location) .

Thanks

2

Thanks for your question, and we completely understand how important accurate delivery expectations are during the holiday season.

For BFCM and the holidays, the Shop Promise delivery date prediction model should automatically adjust for longer processing times to account for busier periods and days when you may not be shipping. It continues to learn from your store’s historical order and fulfillment patterns, including how your operations behaved in prior holiday seasons.

The model also adapts to carrier cut-off trends based on previous years’ data, helping ensure that the delivery dates shown to customers remain as accurate and reliable as possible during peak periods.