Estimated delivery dates

Estimated delivery dates show buyers a concrete arrival window — like “Wednesday, October 27 – Thursday, October 28” — under each shipping rate at checkout. Buyers who can see when an order will arrive convert better and raise fewer “where is my order?” tickets.

Delivery dates have two modes:

• Off (default) — no dates are shown anywhere.
• Manual — you tell Sellerlane how long you take to fulfill and how long each rate takes in transit, and it computes the date range per order.

Turn on manual delivery dates

1. Go to Settings → Shipping and open the Estimated delivery dates card.

2. Choose Manual.

3. Pick your fulfillment time — how long you need between receiving an order and handing it to the carrier:

   • Same day
   • Next day
   • 2 business days
   • Custom — 3 to 40 business days
   • Custom — 1 to 8 weeks

4. Save.

The fulfillment time is store-wide. It’s combined with each rate’s transit time to produce the range the buyer sees.

Add transit times to your rates

Each manual rate (Flat Rate, Price Based, or Weight Based) carries its own transit time — the number of business days the parcel spends with the carrier.

1. Go to Settings → Shipping, open the profile with Manage Rates, and edit a rate inside a zone.

2. Choose a transit time: pick one of the presets for the destination country, or set a custom minimum and maximum in business days.

3. Save. Repeat for every rate you want dates on.

Note

Carrier-calculated rates don’t take a transit time. They use the delivery dates returned by the carrier itself, when the carrier provides them — your fulfillment time is not added on top, because carrier dates are already arrival estimates. See Carrier-calculated shipping.

How the date range is calculated

The engine works in business days — Monday to Friday — with a 12:00 pm cutoff in your store’s timezone:

• An order placed before 12:00 pm starts counting on the same business day.
• An order placed after 12:00 pm starts counting on the next business day.
• Weekends never count as business days, but the printed range is a real calendar range, so it can span a weekend.

Worked example. Your fulfillment time is 2 business days and the rate’s transit time is 3–5 business days:

• A buyer orders Wednesday at 10:30 am — before the cutoff, so Wednesday is business day 1. Fulfillment takes Wednesday and Thursday; transit runs Friday, Monday, Tuesday (minimum) up to Thursday (maximum). The buyer sees roughly Tuesday – Thursday of the following week.
• The same order at 12:30 pm starts counting on Thursday instead, and the whole range shifts one business day later.
• An order placed Friday at 1:00 pm starts counting on Monday — Saturday and Sunday are skipped.

Caution

The calculation has no public-holiday calendar — holidays count as normal business days. If a holiday will delay you, temporarily switch to a longer fulfillment time (or turn dates Off) so you don’t over-promise.

Where dates appear

• Checkout — the date range shows under each shipping rate that has one.
• Order confirmation email — the order’s consolidated estimate; when an order ships in several parts, it shows the slowest range.
• Shipping confirmation email — a per-package delivery estimate line when the shipment carries dates.
• Order status page — the estimate shows alongside the order’s delivery details.

Rules to know

• All-or-nothing per checkout. If any rate offered to the buyer lacks transit times, no rate shows dates for that checkout. One mixed rate without dates would make the others look slower, so dates are suppressed across the board — give every rate in your zones a transit time to keep dates visible.
• Combined rates show the slowest. When items from different profiles or origins combine into a single delivery option, the option shows the slowest member’s range.
• Dates only show when everything is in stock. If any quoted item is out of stock, no dates are shown — Sellerlane can’t stand behind a date for an item you can’t ship yet.
• Carrier-calculated rates use the carrier’s dates. When the carrier returns delivery dates they’re shown as-is; when it doesn’t, that carrier service shows no dates (which also suppresses dates on the other rates in that checkout, per the all-or-nothing rule).
• Estimates are display information only — they never change the price of a rate or block a checkout.

Next steps

Carrier-calculated shipping

Live rates and carrier-provided delivery dates from your own carrier account. See Carrier-calculated shipping.

Shipping & checkout

Set up the zones and rates your transit times attach to. See Shipping & checkout.