The delivery option you don't offer is costing you sales

Here's an uncomfortable number: around 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before payment, according to the Baymard Institute. And when shoppers are asked why, two of the top fixable reasons are about delivery: 39% leave because extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees) are too high, and 21% because delivery is too slow. In France, nearly 75% of online shoppers name high delivery costs as their main reason for abandoning a cart.

In other words, your delivery offer isn't a warehouse topic. It's a checkout topic, and it directly decides how much of your traffic turns into revenue. The good news: unlike your product or your market, this one is entirely under your control. Let's walk through the options, the providers, and how to build a delivery mix that converts instead of repels.

The delivery menu: what you can actually offer

• Home delivery (standard) : the default reflex: 24-72h in France. Its hidden weakness is the failed first attempt (customer not home), which costs a second run and often a "where is my order?" support ticket.
• Express : next day before 10am, 1pm or 6pm, with a guaranteed delay. Three to seven times the standard price: keep it for high-value baskets or urgent purchases.
• Point relais (pickup point) : delivery to a local shop. Cheaper than home delivery, almost zero failed attempts, and the customer has up to 14 days to collect.
• Lockers : automated lockers accessible 24/7 with a QR code. The fastest-growing out-of-home segment in Europe.
• Click & collect : in-store pickup: free for the customer, and it drives foot traffic. Unbeatable if you run physical stores.
• Scheduled delivery : e.g. DPD's Predict, which announces a one-hour window and lets the recipient reschedule mid-route.

Our advice: you don't need all of them. You need the right two or three.

Notice what makes the difference between these options: practicality. Your customers don't choose a delivery method out of love for a carrier; they choose what fits their daily life. Not having to stay home all afternoon. Picking up the parcel at the bakery around the corner, or from a locker at 11pm. The options that convert are the ones that are easy to live with, and that's exactly why out-of-home delivery keeps growing.

The main carriers in France (and when to use each)

Five players handle roughly 60% of parcel volume in France: Colissimo, Chronopost, DPD France, Mondial Relay and DHL. Here's how to position them:

Two useful clarifications. First, public prices are just anchors: merchant rates are negotiated on volume (at Colissimo, the 2kg drops to ~€11.43 excl. VAT on the pro grid). Second, TNT no longer exists as such: it has been FedEx since 2016.

And don't forget pickup logistics on your side: dropping parcels at a drop-off point is cheaper than having the carrier collect at your door. On a real client project, paying one home collection instead of using drop-off rates made a ~€20 difference over 10 orders, which is meaningful when you're starting out.

Point relais: the French peculiarity you can't ignore

France is Europe's out-of-home delivery champion. 41% of European shoppers redirect their parcels to a pickup point or locker, and in France 57% receive via a courier parcel shop. Three networks dominate: Mondial Relay (~17,000 points, part of the InPost group), Pickup (~17,000 points shared by Chronopost, Colissimo and DPD), and Relais Colis (10,000+, now owned by GLS). For your customers: cheaper, no missed appointments, 14 days to collect, and it's greener: up to ~30% less last-mile CO₂ per parcel. For you: a relay option at checkout is often the difference between a sale and an abandonment over shipping fees.

Delivery is a two-way trust contract

Here's something merchants often forget: the carrier is the only physical contact between your customer and your brand. Your site can be beautiful, your checkout flawless, but if the parcel arrives late, damaged, or with no tracking, it's your shop the customer blames, not the carrier. Conversely, a delivery that goes exactly as promised builds the kind of trust that brings people back.

This plays out at checkout too. Displaying names your customers already know (Colissimo, Mondial Relay, Chronopost, DPD) is an immediate trust signal: they know what to expect, they've used them before. An unknown, anonymous "standard shipping" option asks them to take a leap of faith, and some won't.

And the trust runs both ways: you also need to trust your provider. Before signing, look at claims handling, real on-time performance, support quality and tracking reliability, and test with your own volumes before committing. A cheap carrier that loses 2% of your parcels is the most expensive one you'll ever use.

Too many carriers? That's exactly what aggregators are for

Signing and managing five carrier contracts is nobody's passion. Shipping aggregators give you one integration (or one plugin) that unlocks dozens of carriers: labels, tracking, automation rules, and a pickup-point selector at checkout. Beyond the carrier catalog, their real value is practical: one dashboard instead of five portals, labels printed in bulk in two clicks, orders synced automatically: the kind of everyday time saving that compounds fast.

• Sendcloud : the European reference: 160+ carriers, excellent API documentation, a free plan to start, and a service-point picker for your checkout. Note for custom builds: no true sandbox (you test with free "letter" labels).
• Packlink : very good plug-and-play for Shopify, WooCommerce or PrestaShop, free (pay per shipment). But no public API documentation: on a recent headless project, we had to reverse-engineer their plugin to integrate it. Great on standard platforms, risky on custom stacks.
• ShippyPro : strong European and global catalog (185+ carriers), clean OpenAPI, volume-based pricing, no free plan.
• EasyShip : the cross-border specialist: 550+ couriers, landed costs (duties and taxes) displayed at checkout, developer sandbox, free plan.
• ShipStation : the US giant (Auctane, which also owns Packlink): solid API with a sandbox, but check French carrier coverage before committing.

A pattern we see constantly: the tool is rarely the blocker; integration quality is. A checkout that displays the right pickup points for the customer's address, or labels generated automatically the moment an order is paid, is what actually saves hours and converts.

Building your mix (by maturity)

• Launching: two or three options maximum: standard home (Colissimo), one relay network, express as an option. An aggregator's free plan avoids negotiating contracts on day one.
• Scaling: plug your own negotiated contracts into an aggregator, automate allocation rules (weight, destination, basket value), and track your failed-first-attempt rate: every second run is pure margin evaporating.
• Physical stores going digital: click & collect and ship-from-store turn your shops into a logistics asset pure players can't copy.

The mistakes that quietly kill your conversion

• Offering only home delivery, at full price
• Advertising "free shipping" then revealing a €12 fee at checkout (remember the 39%)
• A single carrier: one strike, one network outage, and your whole shop stops shipping
• Ignoring tracking notifications: "where is my order?" tickets are a delivery problem, not a support problem
• Choosing a provider on price alone, without checking integration quality with your stack
• Showing carriers nobody recognizes: at checkout, trust is also a logo
• Forgetting the customer's daily reality: an impractical option is an unused option

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Delivery is a promise made at checkout and kept at the door. The winners aren't the shops with the most options, but the ones with the right two or three: clearly priced, practical for the customer, and run by providers both sides can trust. At Saphes IT-Systems, we design and integrate exactly that: carriers, aggregators, pickup-point selectors and automations wired into your e-commerce stack. Want an honest look at your delivery setup? Let's talk.

Useful links: compare delivery prices with the EU parcel delivery price calculator and Eurosender.