How We Get Your Gear To You
Straight answers on carriers, cost, timing, and where we ship. Read the UPS section before you pick a shipping method at checkout. It will probably save you a headache.
| UPS First Ground or Ground Saver | Free Over $75 Applied automatically in cart | 1pm ET Cutoff Target for same day, not a promise | US Only No international shipping |
What You Can Pick At Checkout
Every order in the lower 48 gets three shipping choices. What you pay depends on whether your cart has cleared the $75 free shipping line. The cart does the math for you, so you only ever see the tier that applies to your order.
| Service | Under $75 | $75 and over | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ground Advantage or Ground Saver | $5 | Free | Our economy service, and the one that is free once you clear $75. We ship it as either USPS Ground Advantage or UPS Ground Saver, whichever we can do at that price. When the two are close we take Ground Saver. |
| UPS Ground Our Pick | $8 | $5 upgrade | The fastest and most consistent service leaving our facility, start to finish in the UPS network. Worth the upgrade on anything you need by a date, and on anything with glass in it. |
| USPS Priority | $10 | $8 upgrade | The most expensive option on the list. Read the next section before you pick it. |
| Local Pickup | Free | Free | Available on orders of $20 and up. We will contact you to arrange a time. |
Alaska and Hawaii ship at a flat $10 regardless of cart total. Orders under $20 ship on the economy service only. On a tiny order the upgrade costs us more in postage than we charge for it, so we keep the price honest instead of padding the item.
What UPS Ground Saver Actually Is
When you pick the economy option you may get USPS Ground Advantage or you may get UPS Ground Saver. Both cost you the same. The difference is who carries it, and we make that call when we pack your box.
UPS carries it, your mail carrier delivers it
Ground Saver is a hybrid. UPS moves the package for the long haul, which is the part of the trip where things actually go wrong, then hands it to USPS for the last mile so your regular mail carrier drops it at the door. You get the UPS network for the distance and the post office for the doorstep.
It runs about the same as USPS Ground Advantage, sometimes less, and it takes roughly one extra day compared to straight UPS Ground. When the price is close, we take Ground Saver every time, because the package spends most of its trip somewhere we trust.
Whether we can use it on your order comes down to where you are and the size and weight of the box. Sometimes the cost gap is too wide for us to absorb and it goes USPS instead. Either way you pay the same $5, or nothing at all over $75.
Ground Saver
Cheapest to you. UPS for the long leg, USPS for the last mile. About one day slower than UPS Ground. Our default when the numbers allow it.
UPS Ground
UPS end to end, no handoff. Fastest and the most predictable delivery date. The upgrade we recommend.
USPS Priority
USPS end to end. Costs the most of the three and, out of our region, does not earn it. See the next section.
Why We Recommend UPS Ground
Paying more does not buy you faster
Most people see the word Priority and assume it means quicker and safer. Out of our region, it usually does not. That is the single most useful thing we can tell you on this page.
We ship out of northern Indiana. From here, UPS Ground has a materially better on-time record than USPS Priority Mail. Priority packages leaving our area sit in transit, get rerouted, and land behind schedule often enough that we stopped recommending the service. UPS Ground moves on a fixed schedule out of this hub and it holds to it.
That is the entire reason the UPS Ground upgrade exists on our checkout. Paying $8, or $5 once your order clears $75, buys you a package that shows up when the tracking says it will. Paying $10 for USPS Priority buys you the word Priority.
It is also why we push the economy tier toward UPS Ground Saver whenever the cost lets us. Given the choice we would rather your box ride in the UPS network, at every price point.
The honest version
USPS Priority is a genuinely good service in some parts of the country. If you live near a strong postal hub and Priority has always treated you right, take it. We are not going to tell you your own experience is wrong.
What we are telling you is what we see from our side of it, across a lot of orders, leaving from our specific facility. If you are choosing between two lines on a checkout screen and you have no strong opinion, choose UPS Ground.
Tracking you can trust
UPS scans hand off cleanly between facilities. When the estimate moves, you find out. You are not refreshing a page that has said “In Transit” for five days.
Better handling on glass
If your order has glass in it, this matters more than the price difference. Fewer hands and fewer transfers means fewer claims. We would rather you get the piece than the refund.
Delivery dates that hold
UPS Ground commits to a delivery date and hits it. If you are buying for a birthday, a trip, or a session on a specific day, that certainty is what you are paying for.
Processing And Transit
Two separate clocks. Processing is how long we take to pack your order and hand it to the carrier. Transit is how long the carrier takes after that. Neither carrier counts weekends or holidays as transit days.
Processing, and the honest caveat
Orders placed before 1pm ET on a business day are packed and out the same day. That is the target and we hit it most days.
It is not a guarantee. This is a one-person operation, and now and then something stops packing earlier than planned. When that happens you hear it from us rather than from silence, and any stretch where delays are likely gets posted before you order. Custom glass drops and made to order items are called out on their own product pages and run longer by design.
Transit from northern Indiana
UPS Ground reaches most of the Midwest and Great Lakes in 1 to 2 business days, the East Coast and South in 2 to 3, and the West Coast in 4 to 5.
Ground Saver runs about a day longer than UPS Ground because of the postal handoff at the end. USPS Priority quotes the same range as UPS Ground on paper. The difference is how often each one holds to it.
SHIPPING FROM 46628, NORTHERN INDIANA
Transit Times At A Glance
| Where you are | UPS Ground | UPS Ground Saver | USPS Ground Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midwest and Great LakesIndiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota | 1 to 2business days | 2 to 3business days | 2 to 4less predictable |
| East Coast and SouthNew York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New England, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi | 2 to 3business days | 3 to 4business days | 3 to 5less predictable |
| Plains and Mountain WestTexas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico, Utah | 3 to 4business days | 4 to 5business days | 4 to 6less predictable |
| West CoastCalifornia, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona | 4 to 5business days | 5 to 6business days | 5 to 8less predictable |
| Alaska, Hawaii, PO boxes, APO and FPOAnywhere UPS does not reach cleanly | n/ause USPS | n/ause USPS | Variesyour only option |
Swipe the table sideways to see every service.
United States Only
We ship within the United States and nowhere else. That includes Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, and every other country. International addresses cannot be entered or paid for on this site, so if you are ordering from outside the US, checkout will stop you before you spend anything.
This is not a temporary pause on one country. We closed international shipping across the board.
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- France
- Australia
- All other countries
The Canada exception
Canada is the one place we will occasionally take a look. Depending on what you want and what it costs to move it across the border, we may be able to work something out by email. That is a maybe, not a promise, and it gets handled case by case before you place an order, never after.
Email [email protected] with the exact items you want and your city and province. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost, and how long it would take. If the answer is no, you will get a no, not a week of silence.
Everywhere outside the US and that occasional Canadian exception, the answer is no for now. We would rather say that up front than take your money and cancel the order the next day.
Stalled Tracking And Damaged Boxes
Once your label is created you get a tracking number by email. If that tracking stops moving, or the package is marked delivered and it is not on your porch, here is the fastest route to an answer. It is different depending on who has the package.
USPS: go to your local post office
Your branch can do something we cannot. Their terminal pulls the GPS coordinates the carrier’s scanner recorded at the delivery scan, which is how a package marked delivered gets found at the wrong house or behind the wrong gate.
Call the branch directly or walk in. Skip the national 1-800 line, it cannot see that data. This route solves it far faster than we can from our end, because we have no visibility into a package once USPS has it.
UPS: contact us
We have more room to work on the UPS side. If a UPS or Ground Saver package is stuck, late, or shows delivered when it is not, email us with your order number and we will do our best to help you sort it.
Tell us what the tracking says and what you are seeing on your end. The more detail we have going in, the better the odds of a useful answer coming back.
Damaged in transit
Photograph the box and the contents before you move anything, then email us the same day with your order number. We handle the carrier claim from there. Glass is packed for the trip, and on the rare occasion it does not survive we make it right.
Wrong address
We ship to the address you enter. Email us the moment you catch a mistake and we will try to intercept, but once a label is scanned it is out of our hands and we cannot reroute it.
Packaging And Split Shipments
Discreet packaging
Your item, or the box it came in, goes inside a plain single color poly mailer or bubble mailer. Orange or purple, depending on what we have on the bench.
There is nothing on the outside that tells anyone what is in it. No product name, no branding, no window, no logo. Just a colored mailer and a shipping label. Every order, no request needed.
Split shipments
If part of your order is a custom or drop item, we will usually ship the in stock part first at no extra charge rather than hold the whole order. You get tracking for each shipment as it goes out.
Question About A Shipment?
Order issues, a UPS package that stalled, or a Canada request. Reach us either way and you will get a real answer from a person.
