Delivery and Returns in the Checkout: Nova Poshta, Econt, Speedy

More orders are lost on the delivery step than on the payment step, and the reason is rarely the shipping price. It is a branch selector that cannot find the customer’s town, an address form that demands a postcode nobody knows, or a delivery date that appears only after the card has been charged. The buyer has already decided to spend money; the form is what stops them.

This is a solvable class of problem, because the failures repeat. Below is what the delivery block has to do in a Ukrainian and a Bulgarian checkout, why the two markets need different defaults, and how returns belong in the purchase decision rather than in a policy page nobody opens.

Two delivery landscapes

Both markets have moved decisively away from home delivery, but they arrived by different routes and at different speeds.

Ukraine: the branch selector is the checkout

Nova Poshta reported around 54,700 service points in July 2026 — roughly 16,800 branches and 37,900 parcel lockers — and delivered 254 million shipments in the first half of the year. Practically, that means a Ukrainian buyer does not think in street addresses. They think in a branch number they already know by heart, or a locker two minutes from home.

A checkout that asks for a street address first, and offers branch collection as an afterthought, is asking the majority of buyers to do extra work for the least convenient option. The fix is a delivery block ordered by actual usage: locker, branch, courier to the door — in that order, with the first two treated as first-class choices.

Four things a branch selector must get right, and most do not:

• Search by anything. Buyers type a settlement name in Ukrainian or Russian, a street, a district, sometimes only a branch number. A selector that matches only the official settlement name in one language fails a measurable share of real people.
• Fresh reference data. The network added over 5,200 points in six months. A selector fed by a list cached last year is offering branches that no longer exist and hiding ones that opened next door.
• Size and weight awareness. A locker cannot take an oversized parcel. If the buyer picks one anyway and finds out from an operator two days later, the order is at risk. Filter the options by what is actually in the cart.
• Remembering the choice. Returning customers use the same branch. A saved default converts faster than the most elegant map.

Bulgaria: lockers are rearranging the market

Bulgaria did not have Ukraine’s single dominant carrier, and the competition is now playing out in automated parcel terminals. Industry reporting in mid-2026 put automated deliveries at roughly 25–30% of all deliveries, up from 18–25% at the end of 2025. BOX NOW operated around 800 terminals with a stated plan to reach 1,200 by the end of 2026 and to expand from about 160 settlements to more than 320. Speedy also passed 800 automats within a network of over 1,200 points including offices. Sameday’s easybox network runs to several hundred more. Econt, the operator most Bulgarians name first, remains strongest in physical offices and had only a few dozen of its own lockers by July 2026.

Two consequences for a shop.

First, single-carrier checkouts now leave money on the table. A buyer whose nearest pickup point belongs to a carrier you do not support will either accept a less convenient option or leave. Offering two carriers with different network shapes — one office-heavy, one locker-heavy — covers substantially more of the country than adding a second office-heavy one.

Second, the euro changeover in January 2026 reset every shipping price the customer had memorised. Rounded, legible delivery prices in euro are worth the effort; a shipping cost showing as €3.07 because it was converted from a lev tariff reads as carelessness. That sits alongside the pricing, language and fiscal obligations covered in our note on running a Bulgarian online store in 2026.

The five fields where orders break

Independent of market, the same five fields account for most delivery-step abandonment.

1. The postcode you insisted on. If the carrier does not need it, do not ask. Every required field that the buyer has to look up is a chance to stop.
2. The phone number rejected for its format. Accept spaces, dashes, a leading zero, a country code. Normalise on the server. A validator that refuses a correctly typed number is a pure loss.
3. The settlement that does not exist in your list. Buyers live in villages, and reference data is imperfect. Always leave a manual path — a free-text field plus a callback — rather than a dead end.
4. The delivery date that is not shown. “Delivery in 1–3 days” is not a date. “Arrives Thursday if you order in the next four hours” is, and it is one of the few checkout changes that reliably moves conversion.
5. The cost that appears last. Shipping revealed at the final step is the most cited reason for cart abandonment in every study of the subject, and the mechanism is examined in our review of where checkouts lose revenue.

What the delivery block must show, and where

Three placements, three different jobs.

On the product page: the earliest realistic arrival date and the shipping threshold for free delivery. This is doubt resolution, not logistics, and belongs with the other elements in the anatomy of a product page.

In the cart: the actual shipping cost, calculated as far as it can be before an address is known, and how much more the buyer needs to add to cross the free-delivery threshold. That sentence is one of the highest-return pieces of copy in any shop.

At the delivery step: the choice of carrier and pickup point, the date, and the total including shipping and any cash-on-delivery surcharge — which interacts directly with the payment mix described in our note on payment methods that convert in Ukraine and Bulgaria, because the surcharge is often the argument that moves a buyer to prepay.

Returns are part of the purchase decision

Buyers read the returns policy before ordering, not after. A vague policy suppresses first orders from customers who would never have returned anything.

In the EU, and therefore in Bulgaria, distance selling carries a statutory right of withdrawal of at least fourteen days under the Consumer Rights Directive, with defined exceptions for custom-made and certain sealed goods. This is not negotiable by policy text, and the mandatory disclosures that go with it are listed in our note on the legal pages an EU shop cannot skip. Ukraine’s consumer legislation grants a comparable right for most goods bought at distance.

What differentiates shops is the mechanics, and there are only four decisions.

1. Who pays return shipping. Legally the buyer may, if you disclosed it clearly in advance. Commercially, paying it yourself on higher-value categories usually returns more in first orders than it costs in returns.
2. How the parcel gets back. Both Bulgarian and Ukrainian carriers support return vouchers and pre-generated labels. A returns process that requires the customer to phone you is a process designed to be abandoned — and it converts a neutral event into a bad review.
3. How long the refund takes. State a number of days and meet it. Refund speed is what people actually write about.
4. What the buyer sees. A short returns block on the product page — how long, who pays, how to start — outperforms a linked policy document in every test we have run for clients.

Integration: what to automate first

Carrier APIs make three things possible, and they are worth doing in this order.

First, reference data and rates inside the checkout, so the branch list is current and the price is real rather than a flat estimate that loses money on half the orders. Second, label generation from the order, which removes the manual re-typing that produces mis-shipped parcels. Third, tracking statuses written back to the order and to the customer, which is where support ticket volume actually falls: most “where is my order” contacts exist because the shop never told anyone.

Anything beyond that — automatic carrier selection by cost, split shipments, warehouse routing — is worth doing when volume justifies it and not before. The failure mode we see most often is an ambitious integration that breaks quietly when a carrier changes an endpoint, with nobody watching. Whatever you automate needs an owner and an alert, on the same reasoning as the release discipline in our note on updating a live site without breaking it.

Key takeaways

• Ukrainian buyers think in branches and lockers, not addresses. With roughly 54,700 Nova Poshta service points, pickup is the default; order the delivery options accordingly and test the branch selector on a phone.
• Bulgarian delivery is being reshaped by lockers, now around 25–30% of all deliveries. Carriers have differently shaped networks, so supporting two complementary ones covers far more of the country than one.
• Five fields cause most of the damage: unnecessary postcodes, over-strict phone validation, missing settlements, absent delivery dates and late shipping costs.
• Show delivery information three times — arrival date on the product page, real cost in the cart, full total at the delivery step.
• Returns sell. The EU statutory minimum is fourteen days; what differs between shops is who pays, how easy the return label is, and how fast the refund arrives.
• Automate in order: live reference data and rates, then labels, then tracking write-back. Give every integration an owner and an alert.