Shipping is one of the most variable settings for any retail business that sells online due to different destination options, fees, and carriers. In Lightspeed eCom, you can choose one carrier to ship in your town, another carrier to ship across country or abroad, add your own delivery service, and set up different rates for different items.

You can choose one or a combination of these options as your starting point in online sales. Once you get used to fulfilling and shipping online orders, you can add more specific delivery options to your online store.

In-store pickup in eCom

With Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS), you don’t actually ship items. Instead, you allow customers to visit your store at their convenience to pick up their order.

In-store pickup is a good option if you don't offer local delivery and have a lot of local customers.

When you’ve connected several outlets with your eCom, you can allow people to pick up items from all locations, or from specific ones and restrict customers from choosing a location with insufficient items as a pickup option.

You can turn on the date and time picker for in-store pickup to let people choose a preferred pickup time at checkout. This way, you’ll know when to expect customers and can prepare their orders accordingly. In addition, you can specify your store’s business hours to suit your schedule. For example, exclude Saturday and Sunday from available pickup days.

If you need time to prepare an order, you can set a fulfillment time so customers can only select the next day as the earliest pickup option. You can specify a few hours, a full day, or even offer immediate pickups, depending on your needs.

If you offer curbside pickup, you can provide instructions that shoppers will see at checkout.

Local delivery in eCom

Local delivery helps you provide fast, convenient service to nearby customers and is a good option if you already have a team who delivers your retail orders and provide goods or services that have a quick turnaround time.

In eCom, you can offer local delivery either with your own staff or by using a third-party service.

For each of your connected outlets, you can specify the area of delivery. People living outside the area won’t see the local delivery method at checkout.

When you have several outlets connected to eCom, you can create a local delivery option for each of the outlets. To ensure fast delivery, you can restrict local delivery options associated with outlets with insufficient stock from appearing at checkout.

To build a clear delivery schedule, enable the date and time picker to let people choose a preferred pickup time at checkout. This way, you’ll know when to deliver the next order and can prepare items accordingly.

To avoid overloading delivery people and deliver everything on time, you can specify a few hours or a full day as your fulfillment time. That way, customers can only select the earliest delivery time in the next hour, or next day, and your team has time to deliver orders on time. In addition, you can specify your store’s business hours to suit your schedule. For example, exclude Saturday and Sunday from available delivery days.

Live rates for shipping across the country and abroad in eCom

If you deliver across the country or worldwide, you can use shipping post services like UPS or Canada Post and offer live-rates shipping.

Live-rates shipping is a system where shipping costs are calculated in real time based on the rates from shipping carriers and delivery address. When a customer places an order, the system retrieves live shipping rates from a carrier and provides the most accurate price at checkout.

With such automated rates, customers get transparent prices with zero additional costs, while you don’t have to calculate shipping fees manually for different types of items.

Using live rates is useful if you send shipments regularly across different regions, ship large quantities of good to different locations, or heavy and bulky items that require specific shipping logistics.

You can specify the delivery zone for live rates. For example, offer it only for international shipping, or to shipping outside cities where you have outlets.

For multi-outlet stores, you can either limit shipping availability based on actual inventory, or allow shoppers to choose any shipping method as long as at least one outlet connected to eCom has items in stock.