Shipping Info

Holiday shipping notes:

We guarantee all USA orders (all 50 states and territories) orders confirmed by December 13th will arrive before Christmas, including those sent by UPS Ground, or you will receive a 50% refund on your order!

For orders traveling to the West Coast by USPS Priority Mail, the last guaranteed confirmed order date is Dec. 12th. For orders East of the Mississippi, the Priority Mail guaranteed date is Dec. 16.

Exceptions: Natural disasters may cause delays beyond Christmas, as would a meltdown by the postal services or UPS, which since the pandemic began, is always a possibility. We cannot be responsible for delays caused by the vengeance of an angry Earth, or any area declared an emergency zone.

Topics covered on this page:

1. Shipping Discounts - how can you save money on shipping?
2. Shipping times - how long will it take to ship your order?
3. Shipping Methods - how will we ship your order?
4. Shipping Prices - where does that price come from?
5. Canada - what you should know if your order is shipping to Canada

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 by the following business day. Orders placed before noon EST are likely to be shipped that same day. We don't ship on weekends, of course, so note that an order placed on 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 Poast Office Ground Advantage. Addresses in Canada and outlying US territories also take longer. However, the majority of orders will be received in 2 to 4 business days.

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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.

	UPS Ground delivers in 1 - 5 business weekdays and does not deliver on Saturdays, so deliveries to the West Coast may take a full week for delivery. We use this method for large, heavy orders ONLY, and only for the contiguous 48 states.
	USPS Priority delivers in 1 - 3 days. It's the only method we use for Canada, military bases, and outlying US territories. 70% of all orders ship by USPS Priority. Ground Advantage can take 1 - 6 days to reach their destination.

If you are placing a large, heavy order, and you wish to purchase a shipping upgrade, you may do so on the first page of checkout (the "Confirm Cart" page). This will guarantee that your order ships USPS Priority. It is probably not necessary, however, if your order weighs less than 5 pounds. Please note: If you must use a PO Box, then you need USPS Priority.

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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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