# Designing Your Delivery Options: Threshold, Curbside and White-Glove

> Most shops never actually design their delivery options — they take what the carrier offers. For large items, that is a missed chance. Here is how to build a real menu.

By Parcelhub · June 14, 2026

Source: https://parcelhub.ca/blog/threshold-delivery-design-guide

Ask most shops how they landed on their delivery options and the honest answer is they didn't — they took whatever the carrier offered and moved on. For anything large, that's a missed opportunity. Delivery is the last thing a customer touches before they decide how they feel about the entire order, and it deserves to be treated like part of the product.

## Think of delivery as a menu, not a setting

There's no single correct way to deliver a wardrobe or a fridge. There's a ladder of options, each one costing a little more and doing a little more, and your job is to decide which rungs you put in front of customers and how you frame them. Offer one rigid option and you'll lose the budget shopper and the convenience shopper in the same breath.

- **Curbside** — left at the curb. Cheapest, and fine for a customer with a truck and a friend.
- **Threshold** — just inside the door. The default most products should lead with.
- **Room of choice** — carried to the right room, still in the box.
- **White-glove** — room of choice, plus unboxing, assembly and packaging haul-away.

## Let the product set the default

This is the part to get right. A flat-pack shelf one person can manage is a threshold item. A 150-kg treadmill or a glass display cabinet is not — the cost of one cracked panel or one tweaked back dwarfs the delivery fee, so those should default to room-of-choice or white-glove. A reliable rule: default to the level that protects the customer and the item, and let people downgrade to save money rather than gamble on the cheap option.

## Make the menu legible at checkout

A delivery menu only works if a first-time buyer understands it at a glance. Name each option, give it one honest line about what's included, and show the price right beside it. Drop the trade terms — "brought inside your door" lands better than "threshold service" for someone who's never heard it. If customers have to email you to figure out their choices, the menu has failed its only job.

## Decide where the cost lives

- Included in the sticker price, or shown as a separate line — pick one and stay consistent.
- Keep the included tier honest; quietly under-delivering here is what produces the angry email later.
- Treat room-of-choice and white-glove as a genuine upsell, not a surprise tax.
- Revisit the menu whenever your product mix or your carrier rates shift.

Spend an afternoon on this once and it pays back on every large order afterward. A clear menu, a sensible default, and prices that don't ambush anyone turn delivery from the weak link into a reason people trust you with the big purchase — a better return than almost anything you could change on the product page itself.