No shipping policy: AI can't answer "how fast does it ship?"
Shopping agents answer delivery questions from the store's shipping policy, and Google uses shipping details to show products in AI Mode. Without a published policy, an assistant can't say how much or how fast you deliver.
In short
- The product stays in Shopify Catalog, but assistants have less to match against when a shopper describes what they want.
- We did not see this among the catalogs we scanned, which makes it rare rather than unimportant.
- This one needs a human decision, so Endcap finds and groups it but does not write it for you.
Why this weakens matching
When a shopper asks an assistant how fast or how much delivery is, the answer comes from your shipping policy. Without one the agent cannot answer for you.
Shopping agents answer delivery questions from the store's shipping policy, and Google uses shipping details to show a product in AI Mode.
Delivery is part of the answer
Many buying questions carry a delivery condition: "that ships to Canada", "arrives before Friday", "with free shipping". If your policy is missing, you can't be the answer to any of them, however good the product is.
This is one of the fastest fixes in the scan: one page, written once. Keep it accurate and update it when your rates change, because an assistant repeating outdated terms creates support tickets.
How to check it yourself
- In Shopify admin go to Settings > Policies and check the Shipping policy.
- State regions, delivery times and costs in plain language, plus any free-shipping threshold.
- Make sure the policy page is linked in your footer so it's publicly reachable.
The fix
Publish a shipping policy in Settings > Policies with delivery times, costs and regions.
How Endcap handles this
Endcap finds and groups every product with this problem and links each finding to the Shopify document behind it, but it does not write this one for you. Finding every instance by hand means paging through the admin; the scan lists them together.
The fix touches a field we deliberately do not automate. Endcap only writes vendor, product type, description and the Shopify category, because those are the fields where a wrong value is visible and reversible. Prices, identifiers, publication state and status are decisions with consequences a tool should not be making on your behalf.
Common questions
Is the shipping policy the same as shipping rates?
No. Rates are calculated at checkout; the policy is the public text that explains them. Agents and shoppers read the policy before checkout.
Where does Shopify show it?
At /policies/shipping-policy on your store, and wherever your theme links it, usually the footer.
Source: Shopify documentation
Check your own store
Enter your Shopify URL and see whether the public products we can inspect show these problems. No install required for the first scan.