Many of you know we’ve been fighting hard to keep shipping costs down and on-time deliveries up.

We’ve made some improvements to our shipping system, one of which allows us to automatically know if a UPS shipment is in an area that UPS Ground will deliver within two business days. This allows us to automatically select UPS Ground shipments for those packages. This is important, because if a package is within the 2 day delivery radius for UPS, the package will follow the exact same route, whether it is 2nd Day Air or Ground, and UPS guarantees the arrival date equally, whether the package is labeled 2nd Day Air or Ground.

For this reason, our system will begin shipping these packages via UPS Ground. We want to stress that this has no impact on the probability of your package arriving on time. These packages have the same guarantee, and go on the exact same trucks whether the label says Ground or 2nd Day Air.

The price difference for these packages is very small on small packages, so, for now, there will be no changes to our pricing structure for flat-rate shipments. Instead, this will hopefully stave off any shipping price increases for the foreseeable future. On large orders, the price difference for Ground is more substantial, so you will see a change in pricing. More large orders will now qualify for one of our flat-rate shipping classes, and many orders that are still too large to qualify for flat-rate shipping will notice that their shipping charges are more reasonable than in the past if they are in the 2-day radius.

For customers that choose FedEx shipping, all packages will still go out via 2nd Day Air. FedEx Ground is an entirely different company, with different pick-ups and deliveries than FedEx Express shipments, so it isn’t feasible for us at this time to offer FedEx Ground.