Shipping policy

HOW WILL MY ORDER BE PACKED?

Your records will arrive enveloped in bubble wrap and almost always inside a Whiplash brand mailer with crumple zones. For some larger orders or for oversized or unusually-shaped items we may re-purpose a box from one of our distributors, again, with crumple zones, and again, we're still typically going to wrap your records in bubble wrap. We do our best to protect your stuff, but please understand that we have no control over how these boxes are handled after they leave our shop.

SHIPPING

We offer a few different USPS and UPS shipping options, the most popular of which is $7.00 flat-rate USPS Media Mail for unlimited items. Please keep in mind that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on shipping services, and that USPS Media Mail is the most affordable shipping method available for getting vinyl records from one place to another in the United States. As such, it can often be the slowest shipping method available, and it is not unusual for Media Mail delivery to take multiple weeks. Basically, Media Mail is cheap and sometimes quite slow. If shipping time is a major concern for you, please select one of the UPS or Priority Mail options we offer.

We are not responsible for postal delays, and we do not ship replacement items or issue store credit on orders for which USPS tracking status reads "In Transit" or "Shipment Received / Package Acceptance Pending." That latter status has become a fairly common sight with regard to Media Mail shipments over the last couple of years. Here's what it means, best we can tell:

We usually deliver a day's worth of orders to the loading dock of our local Post Office in Opelika, Alabama, where all boxes in a shipment are scanned into that Post Office's internal system using a single barcode generated by Stamps.com. The status "Shipment Received / Package Acceptance Pending" means an item was "Received" at our local Post Office, the Stamps.com barcode was scanned, and the entire shipment was likely immediately put on a truck bound for a sorting facility where the packages should then be "Accepted" and scanned into the larger USPS tracking system. But in some cases, a box isn't scanned as "Accepted" for some time, even though it is usually still moving through the postal system. It will almost always pop up on tracking somewhere close to its destination within a week or two and will usually be delivered shortly afterwards. Having shipped many thousands of boxes of records at this point, we can say with confidence that it is *extremely rare* for USPS to just lose a package, though they may sometimes test your patience. If you're experiencing a shipping delay, you're welcome to file a missing mail request with USPS, but there is frankly very little we can do to help once a box is out of our hands - we've tried it all.


We are also not responsible for, nor do we issue credits for items lost due to mail theft. If you think you are a victim of mail theft, you should absolutely contact your local post office immediately and consider filing a police report.

Sorry, but we do not ship internationally.