Processing time is the hidden variable that makes most WooCommerce delivery estimates wrong. A plugin might correctly calculate that your carrier takes 3 days to deliver — but if your warehouse takes 2 days to pick, pack, and hand the order over to the carrier, your customers will be waiting 5 days and expecting 3.
Getting processing time right is the difference between delivery estimates that build trust and ones that generate complaints.
What Is Processing Time, Exactly?
Processing time is everything that happens between a customer placing an order and the moment it leaves your hands. This includes:
- Order review and payment confirmation
- Picking the item from inventory
- Packing and labelling
- Scheduling or dropping off with the carrier
For a well-organised fulfilment operation, this might be a few hours. For handmade, custom, or made-to-order products, it could be several days. Many stores have different processing times for different product types — stock items ship same-day if ordered before the cutoff, while custom items need 2–3 business days of preparation.
The Right Way to Account for Processing Time
The cleanest approach is to bake processing time directly into your delivery day settings. If your carrier takes 3 days to deliver and you need 2 days to process, your minimum delivery days should be set to 5 — not 3.
In QuickShipD, you set a global Minimum delivery days and Maximum delivery days in the Delivery tab. These numbers should represent the total time from order placement to delivery — processing plus transit. If you have a same-day dispatch cutoff (for example, orders placed before 2:00 PM ship the same day), set your Order cutoff time to that point. QuickShipD will automatically adjust the estimate forward by one day for orders placed after the cutoff.
Handling Different Processing Times per Product
If some products take longer to process than others, use per-product overrides. In WooCommerce, go to any product, open the Product data panel, click the Shipping tab, and you’ll find the QuickShipD section with individual Minimum and Maximum delivery day fields for that product.
Set these to the total time for that specific product: processing plus transit. A handmade item that takes 4 days to make and 3 days to deliver gets a minimum of 7 days in its product-level setting. A stock item that ships same-day with 2-day delivery keeps the global default of 2–3 days.
Communicating Processing Time Honestly
Customers don’t need to know the breakdown between processing and transit — they just need to know when to expect their order. An estimate of ‘Get it Thu, May 14 – Mon, May 18’ is clear and honest. What erodes trust is when that estimate doesn’t account for your actual workflow and the package arrives late.
| IMPORTANT Never set your delivery estimates based on transit time alone. Always add your average processing time before the transit window. It’s better to give a slightly longer estimate that you consistently beat than a short estimate you regularly miss. |
The goal is estimates that are accurate enough that customers are rarely surprised — and occasionally pleasantly so when the order arrives earlier than shown.