Delivery and Payment

What it costs to deliver, and how people pay you. Both are yours to set, and neither needs anyone else's approval to change.

Delivery regions

Add a region for each area you deliver to, with its own fee and its own rough timing — "1–2 days", "Same week", whatever is true.

Charging by region rather than one flat rate is usually fairer both ways: a single national price overcharges the customer nearest you and undercharges the one furthest away.

The customer picks their region at checkout and the fee is added then. Until they pick one, the bag shows the cheapest region's fee as an estimate, so the number they see never goes down at the last step.

Turning a region off stops new orders choosing it without touching the orders already placed against it.

Free delivery

Set a threshold and delivery is free above it. The bag then shows how much more is needed to reach it.

Leave it unset and no promise is made. This is worth getting right — a threshold of nothing is not the same as a threshold of zero, and the difference is a bag that claims free delivery while charging for it.

How people pay

Payment methods are yours to define. Each one has a name the customer reads, a line of instructions, and a kind that decides what happens when they choose it:

• Paid at the door — the order is placed unpaid, ready for you to pack. They pay the courier.
• Paid before you send it — for a bank transfer or a mobile money service. The customer pays you directly, then types the reference from their receipt into checkout so you can match it. The order arrives awaiting payment, and you mark it paid once you see it.
• Paid online by card — needs a Stripe account connected.

The second kind is the useful one if you take payments through a service Helm has never heard of. Because you are the one confirming the payment, it needs no integration at all — you can add a method today and take money through it this afternoon.

Adding a fee to a method

A method can carry a fee of its own — a handling charge on cash on delivery, say. It is shown as its own line at checkout under the name of the method that charged it, so it never looks like the delivery cost or an unexplained rounding.

Switching one off

Turning a method off removes it from checkout and leaves every order that used it exactly as it was. That is how you retire a payment service, or set up a new one and keep it hidden until you are ready.

If you switch them all off, checkout tells the customer no payment method is available rather than letting them fill in a form that cannot be submitted.