Delivery Fees: Charge Per Drop, or Give It Away Over a Threshold

A delivery fee is really a charge for a trip, and Puree has been treating every order as one trip. That was wrong often enough to be worth fixing: an office that takes morning tea at ten and lunch at twelve is two trips, and a week-long conference with a drop on each of five days is five. Order forms can now say so. The same settings page also has a Free delivery over box, for the threshold most caterers already quote in their terms.

Charge it once, or charge it per drop

On an order form’s Settings tab there is a new choice, Charge the delivery fee:

• Once per order — one fee, however many delivery times the order has. This is the default, and it is what your forms already do, so nothing changes until you change it.
• For each delivery time — an order with morning tea and lunch pays twice, and a week-long job pays for each day’s drop.

It applies to the fee whichever way the fee was worked out — the postcode rules on the form, or the default fee kept on a signed-in customer’s saved address. Both are a price for going there once, and this is the setting that says how many times you are going.

Only delivery times the customer has actually set are counted, and an order is never charged less than once. When the fee is charged more than once the checkout shows the working next to the line — Delivery fee ($25.00 × 3) — because $75.00 on its own looks like a mistake and generates an email.

One address can disagree with the form. On a saved address, Charge it offers Same as the order form, Once per order or For each delivery time, which is useful for the one client whose site is across town and whose fee you have already agreed.

Free delivery over a certain amount

Free delivery over takes a figure. An order that size or bigger isn’t charged for delivery, and the checkout says so. Leave it blank and delivery is always charged.

It is measured on the order itself, not counting the delivery fee — otherwise a big enough fee would pay for itself. It is applied after the per-drop multiplication, so an order that qualifies goes to zero rather than down by one drop.

What the customer sees is the useful part. While they are short of it, the fee line carries Spend $18.50 more for free delivery. Once they get there it becomes Free delivery on orders over $200.00, so the fee disappearing is explained rather than mysterious. It is worked out again every time they change the basket.

One thing it deliberately does not do: where Puree doesn’t know the fee yet — no postcode entered, no saved address, nothing to go on — the threshold stays out of it. “Free” and “we haven’t worked it out yet” are different promises, and only one of them is yours to make.

Where to find it

Online → Order Forms, Manage on the form, then the Settings tab. Both settings sit with the delivery date and address labels, just above the discount codes switch. They are per form, so your public form and your corporate form can charge quite differently.

Full detail is in the manual: Delivery Fees by Postcode.