The audit.
Same-day London delivery was a claim we'd had on the site since 2024. It was true when we could pull a bike or a same-day van from a courier partner, and it was a promise we couldn't always meet when the partner was booked out. We ran a proper audit on the last twelve months of London orders that had asked for same-day, and the number was harder to look at than we wanted: 84% same-day hit rate on orders placed before 11am; 58% on orders placed after. That second number is not a delivery claim, that's a coin flip.
Why we kept it up as long as we did.
Same-day was a conversion driver. Buyers landing on the site looking for a supplier read the same-day line and moved on to the product page. Pulling it costs us traffic and conversions. But the cost of a missed same-day promise is bigger than the conversion loss: it's a customer who ordered urgently, didn't get their parcel, and now trusts nothing on the site. And it costs us the second and third order.
What's up now.
Next-working-day UK on stocked lines, ordered before 3pm. That number is 96.4% across the last twelve months and we'll make it right if we miss on your order — reply to the dispatch email and we credit the delivery cost. If you need same-day within London we can still often do it, but as a phone conversation with the trade line, not a promise printed on the catalogue page. That's more honest.
The lesson.
If you print a promise on your site, it needs to be a number your ops team can hit ninety-five plus percent of the time. Anything less and you're trading first-order conversions for third-order trust, which is a bad trade for a trade supplier. If we ever put same-day back on the site, it will be against a contract with a courier partner and an SLA we can actually enforce. Not before.