Delivery expectations in this market rest on a promise somebody else has to keep. You write “delivery within 48 hours” in an advert, and a courier who has never read your brief, driving through Cairo traffic to an address described by its nearest landmark rather than a street number, decides whether that sentence was true. This year made the gap impossible to ignore, because a great many businesses moved online in a hurry and discovered that logistics, not advertising, was the binding constraint.
Delivery expectations start with the promise in your advert
The delivery estimate is not a detail buried in the terms page. For a first time buyer it is one of the three things that decide the order, alongside price and whether cash on delivery is available. It is also the number most likely to have been written by someone in marketing who has never spoken to the fulfillment team.
Set the promise from actual data, then subtract a day of optimism. Inside Cairo and Giza, one to two working days is realistic with a competent courier. Alexandria and the Delta cities usually add a day. Upper Egypt, Sinai and the Red Sea coast add two or three, and some areas are effectively served weekly. A single national promise of two to five days is technically defensible and completely useless to a customer trying to work out whether the order lands before the weekend.
Failed delivery is a marketing cost, not a logistics cost
When a cash on delivery order is refused at the door, the business pays shipping in both directions, loses the margin, ties up the stock for a week and usually loses the customer as well. On the accounts we see, refusal rates run high enough that the cost of failed deliveries can rival the cost of the advertising that generated those orders in the first place. That number almost never appears in a marketing report, which is precisely why it never gets fixed.
Most of it is preventable. Confirm every order by phone or WhatsApp before dispatch, which alone removes a large share of ghost orders. Give a real window rather than a whole day. Send the courier contact in advance. And look at where refusals concentrate, because it is rarely random. It is usually one creative that oversold, one discount that attracted impulse orders, or one governorate where the courier partner is weak.
Coverage decides your targeting map
There is no sense spending money to reach people you cannot serve properly. If a courier is unreliable in a governorate, either exclude it from prospecting until that is fixed or advertise a different, honest promise there. Several of our clients now run two delivery messages, one for the metro areas and one for everywhere else, and both outperform the vague national version they replaced.
The returns policy is conversion copy
A clear returns policy is one of the highest converting pieces of text on an Egyptian store, and most sites either hide it or write it defensively in legal language. Say how many days, who pays the return shipping, what condition the item has to be in, and how the refund actually arrives, which matters enormously for a cash order where a transfer back is not obvious. Then link it from the product page rather than only from the footer.
The businesses winning online this year are not the ones with the best advertising. They are the ones whose operations can support what the advertising says, with stock counts they trust and a dispatch process somebody owns by name.
Once volume passes a few dozen orders a day, spreadsheets stop holding that together, which is usually the point where our ERP, CRM and mobile app team gets involved. If you are not there yet, a short call is often enough to work out what to fix first.
