E-Commerce Retailers Editing and Proofreading Services

The banner says next day delivery. The customer orders at four on a Friday afternoon expecting it Saturday, and it arrives on Tuesday. The cut-off was two o'clock, next day means next working day, and Saturday is not a delivery day on the free service. All three of those facts were on the site, on three different pages, none of them next to the banner.

We edit what online retailers produce — delivery promise and cut-off information, checkout and confirmation copy, dispatch and tracking notifications, stock availability and backorder messages, click-and-collect instructions, delay and part-shipment communications, and the messages sent when something goes wrong with an order. Our editors work on a promise made in three words on a banner.

The delivery promise and its cut-off is what a customer buys as much as the product, and its failure is a headline claim whose conditions live elsewhere. Next day is a promise; the conditions are the product. We work through these so the cut-off time appears with the promise rather than on a delivery page, since the customer decides at the banner and the conditions are only useful where the decision is made; so the promise is expressed as the day the parcel arrives rather than as a speed, given that "order within 3 hours 12 minutes for delivery on Tuesday 17th" removes every ambiguity that "next day delivery" contains; so working days are spelled out where weekends are excluded, because a Friday afternoon order is the case that generates the complaint; so the countdown reflects the actual cut-off including the picking window rather than a marketing figure; so availability is stated per item at the point of adding to the basket, as a single out-of-stock line holding an entire order is the commonest cause of a late delivery that was promised on time; so what happens to a part-shipped order is explained with whether the customer is charged twice for postage; so the dispatch email states the day of arrival rather than only that the parcel has left; and so a missed promise is acknowledged proactively with a refund of the delivery charge before the customer asks. Promises written this way survive Friday afternoon.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including carrier terms, fulfilment data and customer correspondence. We are editors rather than logistics or consumer law advisers, and we offer no view on carriers, service levels or your obligations. What we can do is put the condition where the promise is.