Shipping
Our goal it to ship your order the same day it is placed. The post man arrives about 11:00am so postal orders placed by 10:00am should go out in that days mail. UPS picks up about 4:00pm. Orders placed by 3:00 will normally make the daily UPS pickup.
USPS is generally the least expensive form of shipping and on occasion, the quickest. We recommend USPS in a number of circumstances, including:
1) Orders worth less than $35.00 (an arbitrary amount) because USPS has no tracking. The best they can do is tell you that a package was delivered. A lost package has to be missing for a month after they acknowledge that it is missing before you can even file a claim. Insurance is ALWAYS an additional cost option. In 10 years of being in business, we have NEVER, not even once, received payment for a lost of damaged package. It is just too much trouble. Consequently, we set the $35.00 limit. If we loose that amount, we won't go broke.
2) USPS is very good about shipping to far away places in the USA and it territories. It is not unusual to ship a package to the West Coast in three days using Priority Mail. Shipments under a pound to Alaska and Hawaii are treated like shipping to New Jersey. The only draw back is that there are no guarantees on delivery time and no tracking either, see #1 above.
3) International shipping is normally best handled by the USPS who will then hand off the package to the Postal system in the receiving country for final delivery. Brokerage is usually minimal. Delivery is anybody's guess. Sometime it is only a week or so and sometimes it becomes months. All USPS keeps track of is when they handed it off to the other postal system. Insurance MUST be purchases on all international postal shipments. If you need it in a hurry, bite the bullet and use UPS.
4) Our website does not play well with USPS on International shipping. If you can't get the service you want, call us or put a note in the "Special Instructions" Box and we will follow your instructions.
UPS Our standard method of shipping. Anything not listed under USPS above goes UPS.
We offer the full range of shipping options including. Ground, Three Day (Orange), Two Day (Blue), Next Day (Red), Next Day AM, Next Day Saturday, COD, Collect on your account and charge to third party account. Not all services are available to all shipping addresses.
UPS no longer requires a signature. It is up to the driver to determine the probability that the package will disappear off of your porch. If you want the security of a signature,
Fed Ex We do not use Fed Ex GROUND on a regular basis and do not have a daily pick-up. If they come, it because we called for a pickup. They charge us $15.00 for that pickup and we pass that charge on to you. Even if you have charged the shipping to your Fed Ex account, the Pickup charge will appear on your invoice.
There is no charge for pickup of Fed Ex AIR shipments.
Mind Reading This is a service we do not offer. If you need to have special handling, you must put that information in the Special instructions box. |