Shipping update: live rates and UPS now available

Since day one, we’ve been using USPS exclusively for both domestic and international orders. Ten years ago, we could send a First Class package domestically for under $3, and Priority Mail boxes were around $6. Service was reliable and the prices were great.

Things were understandably rough beginning in 2020, but as the world got back to normal, the rates continued to skyrocket. Each year brought significant rate increases, often more than one. Just this year, we saw an 8% increase in January and another 8% this past April. We’re expecting the usual holiday increase in October as well. The net result is that the rates have almost exactly doubled since 2016.

Alongside that, the service quality has deteriorated. It’s not uncommon for a package to get stuck at a regional distribution center for a week or longer, and we’ve been seeing more outright losses, which was almost unheard of prior to 2020.

UPS now available

Historically, UPS was much more expensive than USPS for the type of packages we were sending, so we never had it as an option. But we’ve watched the USPS rates blow past UPS in the past couple of years, such that a similar level of service from UPS may be as much as 40% cheaper (often $7-8 to ship a kit compared to $11-12). USPS is quickly losing their competitive edge in both price and quality.

So, we’ve been working on implementing a live rates system so you can pick your service. The rates you see at checkout are the prices that we pay for the labels plus the cost of the envelope or box and packing materials. We don’t add any handling fees.

For most domestic kit orders, UPS is going to be the best option by a wide margin, but USPS is still available if that works better for you. USPS is still marginally better for non-kit orders, but it’s pretty close.

There will no doubt be some quirks while we get everything tuned on our end, so if something looks wrong, feel free to confirm with us before placing the order. We’ll be watching it closely on our end, and if we see that anyone was overcharged then we’ll refund the difference.

International orders

Unfortunately international rates are still going to be high no matter what. All of our options in the USA are pretty exorbitant compared to what most other countries pay to send internationally. For larger orders, UPS is pretty comparable in price with much faster delivery times, though they do often charge more brokerage fees for import duties. We’ve also made Fedex available for international orders since they sometimes have much better rates than UPS, particularly to certain parts of Europe.