This article explains the concept of Shipping date adjustment in Ingrid Checkout and the way how to adjust delivery promise in Ingrid Merchant Platform.
What is Shipping Date Adjustment (SDA)?
SDA - is a way for the Merchant to add a static change of the delivery time that will be presented to the end user. SDA can be set as pushing the delivery time one day forward on current delivery time or even adding/creating a date range when e.g. 1-2 days to the delivery time presented.
Background
Ingrid handles delivery time in Delivery Checkout by asking carrier product for lead time from one address to another in order to provide as accurate delivery time as possible. The carrier API has though shown to be to some extent inaccurate but also to give very general answers back. Ingrid has taken several measures to make Delivery Time a key asset for merchants in order to be as accurate as possible to be able to be transparent to merchant customers.
Ingrid has a notion of Shipping date that merchant can add when creating a session for Delivery Checkout. Since shipping date is something a Merchant adds on the session request towards Ingrid when creating a session in Checkout. Setting and changing these dates was cumbersome and took time for Merchants when all they sometimes wanted was a date range for business days (3-4 business days). Many merchants also introduced a static shipping_date on session request just to achieve the date range in checkout.
Shipping date adjustment (SDA) was implemented to be a configurable setting per Carrier products to further improve control and accuracy for delivery time. SDA removed the need for merchant to add static date ranges by shipping_date on session requests. It also made Merchants able to adjust the incorrect carrier lead times returned. SDA basically has the same functionality as shipping_date but it is always static and it will also be added on top of any Shipping_date sent on creating a delivery checkout session
Setup guidance
Adding Shipping date adjustment in Ingrid Platform
Steps:
- Go to Delivery Checkout > Regions > Specific Carrier Product.
- Enable the toggle "Shipping Date Adjustment".
- Set up a unit: Business Day, Day, Hour, Minute.
Note: if the Delivery Category is set to present Business Days then adjusting with Day unit will be a bit harder to foresee the changes when testing - Set the min and max values.
- Test the result and publish the changes.
Units
There are various units under which the SDA can be configured:
1. Day - set the date to next day with 00:00:00 as an hour,
2. Full day - add 24 hours to the current shipping date,
3. Business day - set the date to next business day with 00:00:00 as hour,
4. Full business day - set the date to next business day, but retain the shipping date,
5. Hours - adjust hours, instead of days,
6. Minute - adjust minutes, instead of hours.
Examples of Calculations
Shipping_date + Shipping_date_adjustment impact the delivery time presented before and after address:
- Before address it impacts the Delivery Time start/end set on the category. More on Delivery time.
- After address it impacts what dates are used for polling the carrier products carrier service
- If there is no shipping_date set, carrier products would be polled for lead time as: Start (Now()), End(Now()) = the day today.
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- If SDA was set to min 1, max 2, business days, carrier products would be polled for lead time as:
Start: (1 day + 1 business day), End(1 day + 2 business days) - if the carrier service returns 1 day would be:
- If SDA was set to min 1, max 2, business days, carrier products would be polled for lead time as: