Should Shipping Be a Separate Invoice Line?
Yes: put shipping or delivery on its own line, labeled with the service the buyer chose. The goods total then reconciles with the listing prices, the delivery charge reconciles with the delivery option at checkout, and nobody has to reverse-engineer a merged total. Folding shipping into item prices to claim “free shipping” is a pricing strategy — a different thing from invoice presentation, and the two should not be confused.
Think about who reads the document. Your buyer has two reference points: the listing prices (which sum to the goods total) and the checkout screen (which showed a delivery charge). A merged total matches neither — it is a third number that exists only on your invoice, and third numbers generate messages. A separate line gives every figure on the page a twin somewhere in the buyer's own paperwork. That is the whole argument, and it holds for a £3.95 courier charge on a marketplace order and a £28 pallet line on a wholesale invoice alike.
Label it the way the buyer chose it
- “Delivery — tracked 48h” or “Shipping — standard (3–5 days)”: the service name from checkout, so the line matches the buyer's memory of choosing it.
- “Local delivery — Saturday route” for your own runs: the local delivery walkthrough uses exactly this.
- “Free delivery” as a £0.00 line when you genuinely charged nothing — it proves delivery was included rather than forgotten, and keeps the parcel's paperwork complete.
The tax caveat, stated once and plainly: whether delivery charges are taxed, and at whose rate, varies by jurisdiction and sometimes by what is in the parcel. Your invoice's job is to *show* the charge transparently as its own figure — which a separate line does and a merged price hides — while the tax treatment follows your local rules and your accountant's reading of them. Show the line; take the tax answer from the authority that can actually give it. Then make the invoice — goods, discount, delivery, each on its own line.
“Free shipping”, honestly presented
Many sellers price delivery into the product and advertise free shipping — a legitimate pricing choice that changes nothing about honest presentation. On the invoice, show the goods at their (delivery-inclusive) prices and a delivery line at £0.00 labeled “Delivery — included”. The buyer sees delivery was part of the deal, your goods prices stay the prices you advertised, and no phantom charge appears. What you must not do is have it both ways on paper: prices that quietly include delivery *and* a delivery charge on top, presented as if they were separate costs. The invoice is a record of the deal as agreed — the deal's structure can be anything fair, but the document may not describe a different deal from the one the buyer accepted.
International orders add one more label worth printing: who carries the duties. If the buyer is responsible for import charges on arrival, a notes line saying so (“Import duties and taxes, where applicable, are the buyer's responsibility”) prevents the most predictable cross-border misunderstanding in small selling. It costs one sentence and saves the occasional refused parcel.
There is one more reader to design for: future you, comparing couriers at renewal time. A year of invoices with delivery as its own line is a year of delivery costs, totaled by simply adding a column — the raw material for renegotiating rates, changing providers, or repricing your delivery charge with evidence. Merge delivery into product prices for a year and that evidence does not exist; your delivery economics become a feeling. Sellers run on margins too thin for feelings about a cost they pay on every single order.