Last Thursday, the entire vape industry was given less than 24 hours to stop sending products using the United States Postal Service. That's right - we and every other supplier had less than a day to change our delivery services from the US Postal Services to other carriers.
Don't worry, shipping you your favourite vape juice or device is still legal, and because we've been preparing for this for months, we'e going to be able to keep doing it.
Here's the basic lowdown: Thanks to lobbying from people who would prefer you didn't have access to your favourite vapes, the industry is now relying on smaller local carriers to deliver your packages. These are great companies who really know their local communities, but given the size of the US and the complexity of the supply chains, this means it will take us longer to get your parcels to you, at least in the short term. It also means that we're temporarily unable to ship everywhere in the US.
You can use our ZIP-finder to check if we can deliver to you right now or whether we're still working on getting coverage in your area and if we can't do that just yet, leave us your email address and as soon as we can ship to your area again, we'll email you and let you know. (And we might even send you a personalized discount code, to say thanks for coming back).
Just to give you an idea of how this process actually works, we and every other vaping company now charters our own trucks known as LTL - "less than truckload" services - to get your product to regional inception centres where they're sorted for shipping to the relevant local carrier. Once that's happened, parcels are then loaded onto trucks or planes to another sorting center used by the local carrier; and then on to you. And because these companies are smaller, there are fewer trucks and places available.
This is way more complicated than sending a parcel through the postal service.
The good news is that because of how many people and businesses this affects, this carrier network is getting bigger and better by the day, and in a few months time, you'll barely notice the difference.
But why's shipping more expensive?
There are two reasons that shipping costs have gone up for vaping products; first, because these smaller companies have less economies of scale and higher costs: we expect this to change as time goes on. But the second is that the law also says that we're required to have you sign for your order and show ID to the delivery service before it's handed over. This adds another layer of costs to the process, although we've no problem making sure all our customers are of legal age to vape.
We've decided to keep our delivery costs as low as possible and to be upfront about how they work. That's why our shipping remains the lowest on the internet in most cases. To give you an idea, we took a look at some online vape stores and compared their rates to ours.
We learned that you as a customer need to remain on the lookout for hidden charges!!!
Sure, some sites might offer free shipping, but in a lot of cases, they've just hidden the extra charge in an 'adult signature surcharge'. This might give you the impression that it's a separate charge: we can tell you with absolute certainty that this is always a part of the cost of shipping products to you!
Vaping.com will never charge you for 'adult signature' separately.
When we say free shipping, we mean it. Oh, and by the way, our free shipping threshold is among the lowest on the web, if your order doesn't make the limit, our shipping charges are some of the lowest too!
And how come there's so much tax?
The short answer is because your elected representatives decided to charge them!
As well as making delivery far more difficult and expensive, the Government also requires us to:
- Verify that all customers are 21 or over, using a commercially available database (no problem, and we've been doing this for years!)
- Collect an adult signature (21+) with ID at time of delivery
- Register with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms and the U.S. Attorney General
- Obtain licenses from all states that require vape retailers to be licensed
- Collect and pay all required local and state taxes on vape products.
- Submit monthly reports to all states with details of every sale of vape products and the details of the carrier that delivered them
If the site you buy your vapes from doesn't do this, not only are they are breaking the law and risking a prison sentence, they could be leaving you with a hefty tax bill, since you'd be liable to report State taxes if we didn't do it on your behalf!
This all sounds overwhelming! How will you stay in business?
We've been the leading vape shop on the web for over a decade and we're not going to stop now! We've spent months preparing for this: negotiating with shipping companies to keep our rates among the lowest in the industry and negotiating with our suppliers to keep our prices as low as they've always been.
We do it because we're passionate about helping smokers and vapers make better choices. There might be easier ways to make a buck, but there are few as rewarding as this; not every company gets to make the kind of impact on smokers lives as we do, and we plan to keep doing it.
Leave a comment
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.