Promise a delivery date and keep it

“Delivery in 3–5 days” sits on every product page, whatever the day, the district or the holiday. A buyer in Sylhet orders on the evening before Victory Day, reads “3–5 days”, and starts messaging on day four. Vague promises create the questions you spend your evenings answering, and a buyer who has stopped expecting a parcel is more likely to refuse it at the door. A specific date, worked out honestly and kept, does the opposite: it answers the question before it is asked and gives the buyer a reason to be home.

A promise has four parts

Every delivery date is built from the same four things:

1. Packing time: how many working days from order to handing the parcel to the courier.
2. Cut-off time: the hour after which today’s orders count as tomorrow’s.
3. Transit: how long the courier takes to reach the buyer’s area.
4. Days nobody works: your days off, the courier’s, and public holidays.

Get each one right and the date follows. Guess any one of them and the date is wrong for everyone.

Packing time, measured honestly

Look at your last month of orders and note when each was placed and when the courier picked it up. If most leave the next working day, your packing time is one day, even if some leave the same day. Promise what you usually achieve, not what you manage on a quiet Tuesday.

Some products need longer. A made-to-order sherwani, a custom-sized blouse or a printed mug cannot leave as fast as a T-shirt off the shelf. Give those products extra days of their own and say why on the page, for example “Made to order, ships in 5 working days”. When an order mixes fast and slow items, the slowest item sets the date, unless you ship the parcel in two parts and say so.

Pre-orders work the same way, counted from the day the stock arrives: “Ships from 12 November, arrives 14–16 November” is a promise a buyer can plan around.

Cut-off times

A cut-off is the latest an order can arrive and still be packed today. It usually follows the courier’s pickup: if the rider collects at 5 pm and packing takes two hours, your cut-off is around 3 pm.

Write it in your store’s time zone and stick to it. Before cut-off, the date is counted from today; after it, from the next working day. If you show a countdown, show a real one: “Order within 2 hours 14 minutes to get it by Thursday” is useful only when it is true. Never invent urgency.

Transit per area, not per country

A single figure for the whole country is always wrong somewhere. Group the places you deliver to the way your couriers do, for example inside Dhaka, Dhaka’s suburbs such as Savar and Gazipur, other district towns, and remote upazilas. Give each group a range from its fastest to its slowest usual delivery, such as one to two days inside Dhaka and two to four elsewhere, based on what your own parcels actually did.

Different couriers are different. If you send Chattogram parcels with one courier and Rajshahi parcels with another, measure each separately. A range is more honest than a single day, and buyers here read “Wednesday to Thursday” without complaint.

Holidays, fixed and moving

Holidays are where most promises break. Put them in your calendar before they arrive:

• Fixed every year: Shaheed Day on 21 February, Independence Day on 26 March, Pohela Boishakh on 14 April, May Day on 1 May, Victory Day on 16 December and Christmas Day on 25 December.
• Moving: Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha, which shift every year and can close couriers for several days, plus any other days your couriers announce.

Couriers publish their own closures, especially around Eid. Read their notices and add those days too. Before Eid, bring your cut-off forward and say so on the store, so the buyers who want a parcel before the holiday order in time.

A worked example

A buyer in Sylhet orders a saree on Tuesday 15 December 2026 at 4 pm. Your cut-off is 3 pm, so packing starts on the next working day. Wednesday 16 December is Victory Day, so the parcel is packed and handed over on Thursday 17 December. Transit to Sylhet is two to three days, so the promise is Saturday 19 to Sunday 20 December.

Without the holiday and the cut-off, the page would have said Thursday. The buyer would have started messaging on Friday.

Keep the promise with the order

The date the buyer read before ordering should travel with the order: on the confirmation, on the tracking page and in the emails about the parcel. If something goes wrong, such as a courier delay or a flood that closes roads in Sunamganj, tell the buyer before they ask, with the new date.

A useful rule of thumb from the regulator’s side: the Digital Commerce Operation Guidelines of 2021, as summarised in the press and by law firms, expect delivery within five days in the same city and ten days elsewhere. Check the current text for your own case, and keep your promises well inside it.

Measure promises kept

Once a month, take your delivered parcels and compare each delivery day with the date you promised. Split the result by courier and area:

• the share delivered on time or early
• the share delivered late, and by how many days
• the usual and the slowest transit

Pick a target, for example nine parcels in ten on time, and when a courier and area fall below it, change the promise rather than hoping it improves. Wait until you have enough parcels to judge; a lane with five deliveries tells you very little.

How Bazuva handles it

Bazuva turns your packing days, cut-off, each rate’s transit range, your days off and your holidays into a date on the product page, in the cart and at checkout, for the place the buyer picks down to the upazila. Bangladesh’s fixed holidays are added in one click and return every year; Eid and other moving holidays are added by date. Extra packing days can be set per category, product or variant, pre-orders are dated from their ship day, and the countdown appears only when a cut-off is set. The promised dates are kept with the order and shown on the tracking page and in the shipment emails. A promise accuracy report shows each courier, zone and warehouse’s on-time, early and late share, and suggests a new delivery time when a lane slips. See the delivery dates page, and the shipping page for zones and rates.

If your product pages still say “3–5 days”, the delivery dates page shows how one is worked out, step by step.