Shipping Info

How Shipping Discounts Work:

If the items in your cart total $50 or above when you check out, you will receive a discount. Shipping Discounts are calculated during the last step of checkout. Until then, shipping will be displayed at the regular price. But don't worry, you will see the discount before you pay.

Where Shipping Discounts Are Displayed:

On the last step of checkout, after you have entered your shipping address but before you make a payment, you will see the discount displayed in your Order Summary. An example screenshot is shown below.

Shipping Times

We ship over 80% of orders within 1-2 business days. We don't ship on weekends, of course, so note that an order placed on Thursday evening or Friday may not ship until the following Monday.

Once your item is in the mail, how long it will take to reach you depends on the shipping method and where you are located. Addresses in the Northeast take 1 to 3 travel days, whereas addresses on the West Coast take up to 6 business weekdays if the package is large and ships via UPS Ground or Post Office Ground Advantage. (Oddly, though, sometimes the Post Office delivers Ground Advantage to the West Coast within 3 days. Go figure. Addresses in Canada and outlying US territories also take longer. However, the majority of orders will be received in 4 to 5 business days. Please note the head of the Post Office acknowledges that he is deliberately dismantling the Post Office piece by piece in order to make a bid to privatize it, so the Post Office service is just what it is these days and there are no guarantees of anything.

Shipping Methods

We use UPS Ground and USPS Priority and the new USPS Ground Advantage for shipping, depending on which is least expensive. Generally, heavier packages ship via UPS and lighter packages ship via USPS Priority. It is probably not necessary to choose Priority Mail if your order weighs less than 5 pounds. It will likely go by the fastest route based on size. Please note: If you must use a PO Box, then you need USPS Priority.

Shipping Prices

There's no such thing as free shipping.

Huge companies like Amazon get discounts from carriers, but smaller companies like us pay the regular "business rate", which is about 10% less than retail. Websites that offer free shipping manage this by budgeting some extra leeway into the price of the product, so you're still paying for shipping, it's just built into the product price. Typically customers at Amazon, for instance, are paying first for expensive Prime membership and then usually a differential for any product stocked in Amazon warehouses. They just don't see it on their website.

We're not saying this is a bad thing, it works for Amazon because they run their own fleet (larger than the Post Office these days), but it's not for us. The shipping prices you see during checkout here are meant to accurately represent the actual cost of mailing your order to you.

How this is done:
The cost of shipping is calculated twice. Once "by weight" and once "by volume" in order to take advantage of Flat Rate boxes (which cost the same no matter how heavy they are). Then the cheapest of the two options is shown to you. That's why sometimes adding a small item causes a big change in the shipping - it can result in the whole order needing to go into a different box.

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Shipping to Canada

We do not have a distributor in Canada, which means your order will ship from Boston, MA. As a result, shipping to Canada must be done by USPS Priority, requires a customs form, and costs USPS International rates. The form takes time and disrupts the shipping process, which can sometimes result in an order taking an extra day to ship.

The price of shipping to Canada is accurately shown in checkout. We wish it were cheaper, but unfortunately it costs us a minimum of $26 to ship an order to Canada!

After that initial $26 price, which is for shipping a single pound, the price goes up about $2-$6 per additional pound. As you can see, it is a good idea to place larger orders so you do not have to re-order as frequently, because that saves you money on shipping. Since the pandemic began, we cannot guarantee Canadian orders will reach their destination in any reasonable time frame. Sorry, the world is broken :-)

Undeliverable addresses

Usually this applies to Canadian or military orders. The Post Office will NOT print a shipping label for your package if the address is not in their new (as of June, 2023) database. Their database is seriously flawed and incomplete, unfortunately. If they will not allow a label to be printed for your address as given, we will contact you.

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