It was bound to happen. The high cost of postage has prompted a would-be customer to email us this message: YOUR SHIPPING CHARGES WOULD KILL ME. I have to admit, I am extremely relieved that the would-be customer did not actually purchase anything, otherwise, the Death By Shipping would have lead to my arrest. We do try to keep out shipping charges in line with the actual cost of Priority Mail. A small additional fee is added to cover our costs related to packaging, such as fill, bubble bags, fragile labels, shipping labels, printer toner and so on. All those costs do add up. We could hide the costs by increasing the prices of our pipes, but we are trying to stay competitive and refuse to price ourselves out of the market. Still the email made us rethink how we charge for shipping. Overseas shipping is going to be high, no matter what we do. I apologize to our international customers, but we have no control over what the Postal Service charges. For the United States, however, we have cut the added charge per order on the shipping a little in the hope that when our customers place an order, they are not forced to cancel based on the cost of shipping.
We will be looking closely at the shipping charges as we go into the Fall, but for now, your shipping costs will reflect the new charges and we hope the shipping cost won’t cause any immediate heart attacks.