Myrqvist raised its express price from £9 to £15. Nobody stopped buying.
The Swedish shoe brand Myrqvist nearly doubled the price of its express delivery, from £9 to £15, without losing conversion. At the same time, they cut delivery costs by 40 percent. The lesson: delivery is a product customers are happy to pay for – if you're willing to promise exactly when it will arrive.
Ingrid recently shared a case that's worth reading for anyone running an online shop in Norway. Sam Gibbons at Visualsoft sat down with Douglas Holm, Head of Online at Myrqvist – a Swedish premium shoe brand headquartered in Stockholm, with its own shops in Sweden, Norway, New York and London, among others, and an online shop selling worldwide.
They did something most brands shy away from: they nearly doubled the price of express delivery. The fear is always the same – customers will drop off at checkout. That's not what happened.
Delivery became a product, not a cost line
Myrqvist describes delivery as its tenth best-selling product. That says it all, really. Their recipe is simple:
Free standard delivery as the default
The threshold at checkout stays low for anyone who's not in a hurry.
Paid upgrades for those in a hurry
Customers who need the item quickly can pay to get it faster.
Firm dates instead of vague windows
The customer knows exactly when the item will arrive before they pay.
At the same time, they cut delivery costs by 40 percent. They made click-and-collect the free option, and let customers who want the item at home pay for that. Two things happened at once: costs went down, and delivery revenue went up.
This is just as true closer to home
This isn't an American case with entirely different conditions. It's our neighbour. The same customer expectations, the same wage levels, the same habits at checkout.
Yet Norwegian online shops still treat delivery as something to apologise for. As cheap as possible, ideally free, hoping the customer won't think too much about it.
But the customer does think about it. The Baymard Institute asked people why they abandon their basket at checkout: 21 percent say delivery was too slow. That's not a small niche. That's one in five customers who had already decided to buy.
It's trust that sells, not price
The Myrqvist case is really about predictability. The customer isn't just paying for speed. They're paying to know.
"2–5 working days" isn't a promise. It's a hedge. And customers who are unsure when a parcel will arrive are customers who put off the purchase or go elsewhere. When you dare to say exactly when the goods will arrive, you can charge for it too.
Here's how it looks with Asapp!
We deliver within 60 minutes in Oslo. The driver is on the way within 20 minutes, and it's all run by Oslo Taxi. The cars are already out there – we're not adding more vehicles to the road.
The customer picks Asapp! at checkout and pays for it there and then. You, the shop, pack the item as usual. Everything else happens on its own.
And for those who also have a physical shop: your stock is already sitting in the middle of the city. You're sitting on the most expensive and valuable logistics spot there is. You just haven't sold it yet.
The question isn't whether anyone will pay
- 1.Offer a free standard option, so the threshold at checkout stays low.
- 2.Sell the fast option as a product, not a cost you hide.
- 3.Show a firm time, not a window spanning several days.
- 4.Use the stock you already have in the middle of the city.
Myrqvist gave us the answer: people are happy to pay more to get an item quickly, at a time they can trust. The question is whether you offer it.
Want to see the numbers behind it? We've gathered the studies in the article Fast delivery sells more.
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