Honest delivery times: why a truthful four weeks outsells a fake two days
After a year of container chaos, 'in stock, ships in 2-3 days' has quietly become a lie in a lot of shops. The lie does not cost you the sale — it costs the return, the ticket, the chargeback and the customer.
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Your shop has been lying since roughly March, and it did not notice
Nobody sat down and decided to deceive anyone. What happened is that the green tick on the product page was hard-coded in 2018, back when the supplier delivered in five days and always had. Then containers stopped arriving on schedule, the supplier moved to eight weeks, and the green tick kept saying what it had always said, because a static text field has no idea there is a shortage. Three hundred product pages, all confidently wrong, every day since spring.
This year made the gap impossible to ignore. Containers, chips, timber, steel, the odd ship sideways in a canal — whatever your category, something in it now takes three times as long as your product page claims. The uncomfortable part is that most shops know this at the operational level and have simply not pushed the knowledge up into the storefront, because that is a project and nobody has asked for it.
The lie does not cost you the sale. That is the whole problem.
If the lie lost you the order, it would fix itself — you would see it in the conversion rate and act. Instead the lie wins the order, and then bills you for it afterwards in instalments. Do the arithmetic on a single 90 euro order that should have said 'six weeks' and said 'two days': you paid to acquire it, you shipped nothing, and then came two support emails, one angry phone call, a cancellation, a refund, the payment fee you do not get back, and roughly forty minutes of someone's afternoon.
That order is now deeply negative, and it was never going to be anything else. Multiply it by the number of affected articles in your catalogue and you have a support team that thinks it is understaffed, a returns rate management is blaming on quality, and a chargeback ratio your payment provider will eventually want to discuss. None of those three departments will trace the cause back to a text field on a product page. They will ask for more people.
Four honest weeks outsell two invented days
The fear is always the same: if we write six weeks, they will go somewhere else. Sometimes they will. But the customer who leaves because of a truthful six weeks was never going to be a happy customer at six weeks — you did not lose him, you declined to buy him at a loss. And a surprising share of buyers do not leave at all. In B2B especially, a date is worth more than speed, because the foreman is not looking for a parcel tomorrow, he is planning a Thursday in December.
The competitive reality right now is that the competitor also does not have it. He is showing a green tick he cannot honour, and in four weeks his customer will be furious and shopping again — possibly with you, if you were the shop that told the truth. Honesty in a shortage is not a moral position, it is positioning. You are the supplier whose dates hold, in a year when nobody's dates hold, and people remember that for a long time after the containers start moving again.
How to show real availability without rebuilding your ERP
The perfect version is a live stock feed with per-supplier lead times and a computed delivery date per article. That is a proper project and it is worth doing eventually. The version you can have before Christmas is much dumber: three states instead of one, maintained by the person who already knows the truth. In stock and picked today. Not here, ordered, expected in the week of the 13th. Not here, no date from the supplier — and say exactly that, because a customer can work with 'we do not know' and cannot work with a wrong date.
Put it on the product page, not in the cart, and never at step three of the checkout. Availability that appears after someone has committed is not information, it is an ambush, and it converts worse than the bad news would have on its own. And write the date the way a human would: 'ships in the week of 13 December' beats 'delivery time 22-31 days', which reads like a machine hedging.
- Three honest states beat one green tick — available, dated, unknown.
- Say 'we do not have a date' out loud; customers can plan around uncertainty, not around wrong.
- Availability belongs on the product page, before the decision — not in checkout step three.
- Email the customer when the date slips, before he asks. The ticket he never opens is free.
- Whoever knows the real date needs a field they can edit without a developer.
The part your lawyer would mention if you asked
In Germany, delivery time statements on a shop are not decoration — they are part of what you promised, and a wrong or missing one is exactly the sort of thing a competitor's lawyer enjoys finding. We are not lawyers and this is not advice. But it is worth knowing that the cheerful green tick you cannot honour is a commercial risk and a legal one at the same time, and that both risks are removed by the same afternoon of honest data entry.
| What the page says | What is true | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| In stock, 2-3 days | In stock, 2-3 days | Nothing. This is the goal. |
| In stock, 2-3 days | Six weeks from the supplier | Acquisition + 2 tickets + refund + fee + the customer |
| Ships week of 13 December | Ships week of 13 December | Some visitors leave — the ones who were never going to stay |
| No date, supplier cannot say | Genuinely unknown | Fewer orders, zero angry ones, reputation intact |
- A fake availability wins the order and then bills you for the return, the ticket and the chargeback.
- The customer who leaves over an honest six weeks was a loss-making customer at six weeks anyway.
- 'We do not have a date' is usable information. A wrong date is not.
- Availability belongs on the product page, before the decision — surprises in checkout convert worse than bad news.
Frequently asked questions
On the affected articles, yes — some visitors will leave, and you should expect that number and not panic at it. What you gain is that the orders you do get are orders you can fulfil. Look at contribution margin after returns and support, not at the conversion rate alone: an order that turns into a refund plus two tickets was never a conversion, it was a fee you paid to make someone angry.
Say exactly that, in plain words: currently no delivery date available from the manufacturer, we will inform you as soon as we have one. It feels unprofessional and it is not — in 2021 every buyer has heard it from four other suppliers this month, and they trust the shop that admits it. Offer a notify-me option and actually send the mail. A wrong date destroys more trust than an absent one.
Eventually it helps, but it is not where you start, and treating it as a prerequisite is how shops spend a year showing wrong dates while waiting for a project. Start with three honest states and a date field that the person who knows the truth can edit without calling a developer. Most of the value is in the honesty, not in the automation — the interface only makes it cheaper to stay honest at scale.
Yes, if you label it correctly — a dated backorder is a perfectly good product for a buyer who is planning ahead, and in B2B it is often exactly what he wants. What you must not do is sell it as available and hope the container lands. Also take the payment method into account: charging a card today for goods arriving in February turns a delay into a refund conversation.
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