Three things: what shipping costs, when the parcel arrives, and what happens if the customer wants to send it back. Put the short version where the buying decision is made, on the product page and in the cart, and keep the full version on a policy page that says the same thing in more words.
It is easy to end up with the reverse. The policy page was generated the day the store launched and has not been read since, and the product page says "Shipping calculated at checkout", which is an invitation to add the item to the cart, discover the cost, and leave. Here is what each page has to say, where each one belongs, and what goes wrong when they disagree.
Why does shipping belong on the product page?
Because that is where the customer decides, and the cost of shipping is part of the price.
A customer looking at a $40 item wants to know whether it is a $40 item or a $55 item. If the product page does not say, they either guess or add it to the cart to find out. The ones who guess high leave now. The ones who find out at the checkout leave there, which is worse, because you paid to get them that far.
The same logic runs through whether to show prices on your website: the customer will find out eventually, and a number you hide reads as a number you are embarrassed by. Shipping is the second price on every product.
Google agrees, in a document that governs whether your products can appear in its Shopping listings at all. Its Merchant Center misrepresentation policy lists, under omission of relevant information, "Missing merchant terms and conditions or shipping information" and a "Return and refund policy that is unclear, missing, or not easily discoverable". Not wrong, just missing or hard to find. That is enough.
What should the shipping page say?
Every question a customer would ask at a counter before handing over their card, in the order they would ask.
- What it costs, with the number. A flat rate is a number. Free shipping over a threshold is a number and a threshold. A rate by weight or by region is a short table, not a sentence that says rates vary. If the carrier quotes live at checkout, say what the cost depends on and give a typical example.
- Where you ship, and where you do not. Ontario only, all of Canada, Canada and the US, or worldwide. If you exclude PO boxes or charge more for remote addresses in the north, say so here, because those customers will find out at checkout otherwise.
- How long it takes, in two parts. The time before the parcel leaves you, and the time the carrier takes after that. "Ships in 1 to 2 business days, then 2 to 7 business days in transit depending on where you are" is honest. "Fast shipping" is not a delivery date. Name your order cut-off time and your holiday closures.
- Who pays duties on cross-border orders. If you ship to the US, the customer may be asked to pay duties on delivery. A customer who did not know that refuses the parcel, and it comes back to you at your cost. One sentence here prevents that.
- When tracking arrives. By email, when the label is printed, with a link that works.
- What to do if it arrives damaged. A separate path from returns, with you paying, and a request for a photo so you can claim from the carrier.
Write it in plain sentences. The customer is not reading a contract. They are checking whether the thing will get to them by Friday.
What should the returns page say?
The window, the condition, the cost, and the steps.
- How many days, counted from what. From the delivery date, not the order date, because a parcel that sat at the depot for a week should not eat the customer's window. Pick a number you will honour on the worst day of the month.
- What condition the item has to be in. Unworn, tags on, original packaging, whatever is true for what you sell. Say it once, without the capital letters.
- What cannot come back. Final sale, custom items, perishables, opened cosmetics. Name the categories and mark them on the product pages too, not only here.
- Who pays return shipping. You, the customer, or the customer unless the item was wrong or damaged. Any of the three is fine. Silence is not, because the customer will assume the answer they prefer and be angry when it is the other one.
- How to start a return. The exact steps: email this address, or open your order and click this button. Then what happens: a label arrives, or an address is given.
- What comes back and when. A refund to the original payment method, an exchange, or store credit, and how many days after you receive the item. "Once we have inspected the return" is a promise with no date in it. Give a date.
- Wrong or damaged items. A separate paragraph. You pay, you ship the replacement first if you can, and the customer skips the standard form.
A returns page written this way is a sales page. A customer who can see that sending the thing back would be easy is a customer who buys the thing.
Where do these pages live on a Shopify store?
Shopify has a place for them, and it links them in more places than you might expect.
Shopify's help page "Adding store policies" describes the written policies you can set under Settings and then Policies: return policy, privacy policy, terms of service, shipping policy, legal notice and subscription policy. It also says where the links go by default: "links to your policies are listed in your checkout footer", "a link to your return policy is also listed on your order review page", and "a link to your shipping policy is listed on your product pages and your cart". So the shipping policy is already one click from the product page. What the customer finds when they click is up to you.
The same page carries the sentence that matters most. Shopify can generate template text for these policies, and the help page says, "Although Shopify can generate templates, you're responsible for following your published policies." The generated return policy is a real promise once it is live. If it says thirty days and you had fourteen in mind, you have made a thirty-day promise. Read the template before you publish it, and change what is not true.
Each policy has its own address, in the form yourstore.ca/policies/shipping-policy. Put it in the footer menu as well, because that is where customers look, and the checkout footer only appears once they are already at the checkout.
What does the product page summary look like?
One or two lines under the price or beside the add-to-cart button, saying the thing the customer is about to wonder about.
"Free shipping in Canada over $100. Ships in 1 to 2 business days. 30-day returns." Three short sentences, each one a number or a date. Below the description, a small "Shipping and returns" section with a few more lines and a link to the full page.
Two rules for the summary. It must match the policy page on every number, because a product page that says thirty days and a policy page that says fourteen makes both of them untrustworthy. And it must be one block that the staff edit in one place, so that when the threshold changes, it changes everywhere. A summary pasted by hand into every product description drifts out of date one product at a time.
The cart gets the same treatment. Show the estimated shipping there, or at least the threshold and how far the customer is from it. A customer at $85 who can see that $100 gets free shipping has a reason to add something. A customer who cannot see it does not.
What goes wrong most often?
A short list, and all of it is fixable this week.
- "Shipping calculated at checkout" is the only shipping information on the site. The template default was never replaced. The customer adds to cart to find out, and the cart is where you lose them.
- The policy still contains the template's placeholders. A bracketed company name, a sample address, or a return window nobody chose. Open the page in a private window and read it as a customer would.
- Two different numbers. The product page says thirty days, the policy says fourteen, the confirmation email says something else. Pick one and search the site for the others.
- Processing time is missing. The customer reads the carrier's two days, and the parcel has not left your shop by day three. Nothing is late, and the customer thinks it is.
- The French store has an English policy. On a bilingual store the policy pages are easy to leave untranslated, because they were generated rather than written. A bilingual site means the policies too.
- A returns app was installed to fix a policy problem. The app adds a portal, a monthly fee and a script on every page, and the customer still cannot find out who pays for the label. How many Shopify apps is too many covers when an app is the answer. It is not the answer to a page that has not been written.
What does this cost?
Writing the two pages and the summary is an afternoon of your time, or a few hours of a developer's if the theme needs a block the staff can edit in one place. That is the kind of work the developer hours in our care plan cover, from $129 a month for a small site.
If the store has never had real policies, or the product page cannot show a summary without a designer, the fix belongs inside a store build. Our e-commerce scopes run from $2,900 to $25,000 and up depending on what is in them, and writing the policy pages, the summary block and the cart message from what you actually do, rather than from a template, is part of the build. What sits inside each scope is on e-commerce, and the ranges are on pricing. If the store does not exist yet, Shopify versus a page builder versus a custom build is the question to settle first.
The number that moves the cost is not the length of the policy. It is whether the shipping cost, the delivery date and the return terms are true, the same everywhere, and visible before the customer has to ask.
If you would rather have someone else check, send us your store's URL and one product link for a free teardown. We will tell you what a customer sees about shipping before they reach the cart, whether your policy pages still carry the template's promises, and what we would fix first, whether or not you work with us.