How to publish shipping costs machine readably

An agent comparing you against another store needs the delivered total. If your shipping cost only appears at checkout, it cannot compute one, and it does not resolve the unknown in your favour.

This is the fix for missing shipping terms, and it is a ranking problem rather than a checkout problem, which is why it goes unnoticed.

Unknown is not neutral

There is a persistent assumption that withholding shipping cost keeps you in the running until the shopper is invested. Against a human that is arguable. Against an agent it is the opposite: a store with a published total beats a store with an unknown total, even when the unknown would have been lower.

So the store with genuinely cheap delivery and no published rule loses to a competitor with worse shipping and a stated number.

Publish the ordinary case

The objection is always that shipping is too complicated to state. Usually what is complicated is the tail: remote regions, oversized items, multi parcel orders. The ordinary case is normally one rule and one threshold.

1. State the standard rate for your main market, as a value.
2. State the free shipping threshold, if you have one, as a value rather than a graphic.
3. State the ordinary delivery expectation in days.
4. Name what varies, briefly, so the exceptions read as scope rather than as contradiction.

Where it goes

In your product schema as shipping details on the offer where your platform supports it, and as text on a shipping page that your llms.txt points at. Both, because they are read by different things at different points.

What matters more than the format is that the number exists before checkout in a form that is not a picture. See how to publish policies as text not images.

Check it the way it will be read

Take one product and, using only what is published before checkout, work out what a shopper in your main market would pay to have it delivered. If you cannot do it, an agent cannot either, and it will not ask you.