E-commerce leaders know that delivery is where profits are made or lost, especially when a single basket can contain everything from a notebook to a heavy armchair. For Granit, a Nordic home and lifestyle retailer active in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Germany, that reality became clear when furniture deliveries to Germany no longer supported sustainable growth.
Germany is one of Europe's most mature e-commerce markets, with high customer expectations on next-day delivery and predictable service levels. At the same time, rising transport and road-tax costs make long-distance pallet delivery structurally expensive, especially for mid-priced home and furniture brands.
Into this landscape, Viktor Mercil, CTO at Granit, made a disciplined choice: he chose to temporarily pause certain furniture deliveries to Germany until the economics and customer experience were fully aligned.
Together with nShift, his team redesigned the checkout to reflect real delivery costs, product attributes, and local preferences, creating the conditions to reopen the German furniture category on sustainable, long-term terms.
When one-size-fits-all delivery breaks
With a catalog that spans everything from smaller home accessories to large, pallet-shipped furniture, Granit's previous shipping setup had limited ability to distinguish properly between parcel and pallet economics. In Germany, the cost of direct-to-home pallet delivery on certain larger items increasingly challenged the profitability of those orders. For a period, Granit therefore chose to temporarily pause online furniture sales to German customers, pending a setup that could ensure both sustainable unit economics and a reliable experience for buyers.
Viktor describes the core challenge as having too little control and flexibility in how delivery rules were implemented. The previous setup struggled to consistently distinguish between different weights, product types, and destinations, and it was difficult to prevent less suitable methods, such as out-of-home delivery for oversized goods.
Granit therefore set out to implement a checkout that could systematically support their business rules: presenting appropriate delivery options per item and market, aligning freight prices with actual cost, and creating room for structured A/B testing instead of relying on static assumptions.
This shift reflects a broader trend in mature e-commerce operations: instead of applying one-size-fits-all shipping rules, leading retailers are treating checkout as a strategic platform where delivery logic is continuously tested and refined against live data. The goal is to match customer expectations, which vary significantly by market, product category, and order value, while protecting profitability.
Viktor’s lens: delivery as a strategic lever
For Viktor, the turning point was treating delivery not as a background cost, but as a core part of Granit's value proposition and profitability. With stores and e-commerce in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Germany, he saw firsthand how expectations and cost structures differ by market: German customers look for familiar carriers like DHL, while Nordic shoppers are increasingly comfortable with out-of-home options and parcel boxes.
The thing that destroys margin isn’t what you can see on a spreadsheet, it’s what you can’t see in your customer’s head.
Viktor Mercil, CTO Granit
This intuition is backed by market data. In Germany, DHL holds over 40% of the parcel market and operates more than 39,000 service locations, including thousands of Packstations. Customers expect and trust that network. In the Nordics, preferences split differently: 45% of Danish shoppers prefer service points, 37% of Finns prefer parcel lockers, and Swedes and Norwegians favour a mix of home and letterbox delivery. The question for Viktor became how to design a checkout that could respect those local preferences and still protect unit economics on everything from a single pen to a fully palletized sofa.
This mindset led Granit to introduce a more structured delivery setup for German furniture orders, with two clearly defined services: an express, direct-to-home option at a higher price and a regular pallet freight option consolidated with store replenishment on a longer lead time. When customers were given that transparent choice, almost all selected the regular option, accepting a few extra days in exchange for a more favourable price and clear expectations.
This mirrors broader research on German shopping behaviour: 76% of German consumers check the estimated delivery date before completing a purchase, valuing predictability over pure speed. For Viktor, the German results confirmed that principle in practice: for large, heavy goods, knowing exactly when an order will arrive and at what cost often matters more than shaving a day off the lead time.
Building for experimentation, not one-off fixes
Viktor is clear that the dual-lane setup in Germany is not a one-time tweak, but an example of how he wants Granit to work with delivery more broadly. Rather than locking in a single "best guess" configuration, the team's goal is to use checkout as a platform for structured experiments: testing different free-shipping thresholds, understanding what customers are willing to pay for various services, and seeing how options like Click & Collect or parcel boxes influence both experience and margins.
In practice, that means treating elements such as free-shipping limits for members, price points for pickup versus home delivery, and the mix of carriers per country as variables to be tuned over time. Granit has already prepared for this with clear business rules in nShift Checkout, better product master data, and scenarios ready for A/B testing once enough volume is available.
If you give customers the logic, the choice and the clarity, they’ll tell you what’s actually valuable.
Viktor Mercil, CTO Granit
This approach is aligned with how mature e-commerce operations increasingly manage shipping logic: using live data and controlled tests to iteratively adjust delivery options, instead of relying on static rules that may no longer match customer behaviour or cost realities. Realistic benchmarks from industry A/B testing show that successful checkout and delivery optimizations deliver 5–15% conversion improvements per test, with cumulative annual gains of 25–40% achievable through systematic programs. Shipping-related tests, such as clearer cost messaging or better delivery option presentation, typically reduce cart abandonment by 15–23%. For Granit, this means each variable Viktor tests (free-shipping threshold, carrier mix, pickup option availability) has concrete potential to move not just customer satisfaction, but bottom-line conversion and margin.
Lessons from Granit’s delivery strategy
Many of Viktor's choices are specific to Granit's assortment and markets, but several principles travel well. First, treating large, logistics-intensive categories as their own problem to solve, instead of forcing them into parcel-style rules, creates space to protect both margin and experience in markets like Germany, where pallet freight is structurally expensive. Second, separating delivery into clearly defined options, rather than one blended price, gives customers a genuine choice and reveals their real preferences. Industry data confirms this: across European e-commerce, 47–48% of cart abandonment is driven by unexpected shipping costs, and 81% of shoppers abandon if their preferred delivery method isn't available. Transparency and choice directly combat both.
Viktor also emphasizes the value of combining internal experience with external benchmarks: using their own data on German furniture, while drawing on broader research about how consumers trade off speed, price, and predictability. For other retailers, that means not waiting for perfect in-house statistics before acting, but using available industry insight to set an informed starting point and then refining through experiments in their own checkout.
For Nordic retailers specifically, the data suggests particular opportunities: 73% of Nordic consumers have made a purchase from abroad in the last 12 months, and 48% shop internationally every month. Cross-border logistics complexity (customs, VAT, variable carrier networks) rewards the kind of flexible, rule-based checkout logic Viktor has built. Similarly, the rapid adoption of parcel lockers and service points across the Nordics (37–45% of consumers in Finland and Denmark prefer out-of-home delivery) means retailers who can confidently offer and manage those options will gain both conversion and customer loyalty advantages.
From problem to playbook
The challenge Granit faced in Germany wasn't unique: e-commerce leaders across Europe know that delivery is where profits are made or lost, especially when a single order can contain everything from a notebook to a fully palletized sofa. The structural economics don't lie: rising transport costs, carrier fragmentation, and wildly different regional expectations create a genuine tension between customer satisfaction and unit economics.
Viktor's response was neither to retreat nor to force a one-size-fits-all compromise. Instead, he built a system. By combining transparent pricing, local market knowledge, careful product classification, and disciplined A/B testing, Granit transformed delivery from a cost centre that threatened profitability into a strategic lever that protects margin while deepening customer trust.
That shift, from passive cost management to active, data-driven strategy, is what separates retailers who survive delivery complexity from those who thrive in it. For Viktor, the dual-lane German furniture setup was the proof of concept. For peers across the Nordics and beyond, the principle is clear: the retailers who win on delivery will be those who treat checkout as a laboratory, master data as a moat, and customer choice as the truest measure of what people actually want to buy.
The question for any retailer with a complex catalog, multiple markets, and margin pressure is simple: are you managing delivery, or are you optimizing it?
Author
Thomas Bailey
Product Innovation Lead, nShift
Thomas plays a key role in shaping how new features and platform improvements deliver real value to customers. With a background spanning product, tech, and go-to-market strategy, he brings a pragmatic view of what innovation looks like in practice and how to make delivery experiences work harder for your business.
