How to Set Up Delivery From Scratch

Every ecommerce brand reaches the same point: you have a product, you have customers, and you need to get one to the other reliably. For brands just starting out, delivery can feel like a solved problem. Pick a carrier, print some labels, ship the orders. In practice, the decisions you make at the beginning have a way of compounding, and the ones made without much thought tend to become the most expensive ones to undo later.

Setting up delivery properly from scratch isn't complicated, but it does require making deliberate choices rather than defaulting to whatever's easiest on day one.

Start with your product, not your carrier

The first decision in any delivery setup isn't which carrier to use. It's understanding what your product actually needs.

Parcel dimensions and weight determine which carrier services are available to you and at what cost. Fragile or high-value products have different handling requirements than apparel or books. Perishable goods introduce time-sensitivity that most standard services aren't designed for. Oversized items often fall outside standard pricing brackets entirely.

Before you approach any carrier, map out your typical order profile. What does an average parcel weigh? What are the dimensions? Are there product categories that need specific handling? What delivery speed does your customer expect for your product type? The answers to these questions should shape every commercial conversation you have with a carrier.

Understand the carrier landscape

The UK carrier market has a lot of options, and they're not all suited to the same types of business. The large national networks offer broad reach and high volume capacity but can be inconsistent on service quality. Specialist carriers offer better performance in specific categories or geographies but less flexibility at scale. Newer networks built on electric infrastructure offer sustainability credentials alongside performance, which matters increasingly for brands with public commitments.

The variables to evaluate when comparing carriers: geographic coverage relative to your customer base, service levels available (standard, next-day, nominated day), pricing structure and surcharges, technology and tracking capability, claims process for damaged or lost parcels, and account management quality.

Surcharges are worth particular attention early on. Fuel surcharges, peak surcharges, remote area surcharges, and oversize surcharges can add meaningfully to a headline rate that looked competitive. Understanding the full cost of a carrier relationship requires reading the pricing schedule carefully, not just the per-parcel rate.

Set up your checkout and comms correctly

Delivery starts at checkout, not at dispatch. The promises you make to customers at the point of purchase create the expectations your carrier has to meet. If you offer next-day delivery without a clear order cutoff time, you'll generate complaints from customers who ordered at 11pm expecting delivery the following morning. If you offer a delivery window that your carrier can't consistently hit, your review scores will reflect it.

Get the fundamentals right at setup: accurate delivery timeframes displayed at checkout, clear cutoff times for each service level, automated dispatch confirmation and tracking notifications, and a transparent returns policy. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're the minimum infrastructure for a delivery experience that doesn't generate avoidable customer service contacts.

Build for where you're going, not just where you are

The carrier setup that works for 50 orders a month won't necessarily work for 5,000. Volume unlocks better commercial terms, but it also introduces operational complexity: more parcels to track, more exceptions to manage, more customer queries to handle.

When setting up delivery from scratch, it's worth thinking one step ahead. Does the carrier you're considering have the capacity to scale with you? Do they offer the technology integrations you'll need as your order management system matures? Is the commercial relationship structured in a way that rewards volume growth?

The brands that set up delivery thoughtfully at the start, choosing carriers that can grow with them, investing in the right checkout and notification infrastructure, building reporting into the process from day one, tend to have fewer expensive resets later. Delivery is one of those areas where the cost of doing it properly up front is almost always lower than the cost of fixing it once it's broken.

HIVED works with ecommerce brands at every stage of growth, from early-stage businesses setting up delivery for the first time to established brands looking for a more reliable network. [Get in touch] to find out how we can help.