📦 $5 off your next order & making holiday shipping less stressful 😬🎄

Published: Wed, 11/10/21

It's the Time of Many Packages!

It is a super-busy time of year for everyone and I get a lot of questions about delivery cutoff dates and undelivered packages, so let's talk about keeping your packages safe, when to ship by, and that $5 off I promised you for getting to the end of this email.

Keeping Holiday Packages Safe

5 Tips to Protect Mail & Packages

This is really great advice on how you keep your packages safe this holiday season. Some of the key ideas:

Don't leave your delivered mail and packages unattended
Ask the post office to hold your mail and collect it manually
Customize your delivery options and ask the carrier to leave your packages in a specific location

Just remember once the post office picks up my orders for the day... I only see the same tracking as you. I don't get any super-special insight into your package so if you ask me what's up I'm just going to go into your order, click the link you already have, and tell you what I see.

But what if my tracking says its delivered but it's not there?

The good news is that package theft is actually pretty rare. Most missing packages do turn up in a week or so! If your package is marked as delivered, but you can't find it, these are your next steps:

Check with your neighbors. This is the most common issue--either it got mis-delivered or someone saw it sitting out and brought it inside their own house for safekeeping and just hasn't brought it to you yet. Check with those close in proximity and those with similar house numbers.
Check with the local post office. USPS won't give me delivery details to private property, so it's worth reaching out to them directly to see if the carrier remembers where they put the package. In other instances, USPS scans packages as delivered too soon and the package may still be at the local post office and not delivered yet.
Check with others in the household. Sometimes things get brought in and not mentioned.
Wait a few days. If it's the issue where the package was scanned as delivered, but not actually dropped off, OR the package was mis-delivered to another house and left for the postal worker to collect and distribute again, it often takes a couple days for this all to sort itself out.

Key holiday shipping deadlines

The short version? The sooner the better. Now keep in mind these are ship-by dates, not order-by dates. All my items have processing times listed, so make sure you build that into your holiday ordering plan. I pack orders Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights and packages are collected the next morning.

Deadlines are:

USPS First Class Package: Dec 17th
USPS Priority Mail: Dec 18th
USPS Priority Express: Dec 22
USPS First Class Package International, and USPS Priority International: Dec 6

Now keep in mind these are all estimates by the carriers, not guarantees, and if I'm being honest I'm not comfortable with those at all, they seem awful tight for the supply chain mess that is 2021. You'll want to order as soon as possible to make sure they arrive with time to spare.

Reminder about some important shop policies

🌿 Lost Packages
I am not responsible for lost packages, undelivered packages, or packages that were stolen once they have been marked "Delivered" by the carrier. If a package has gone missing, marked delivered but you do not have it, etc. your next step should be to contact your local post office.

🌿 Whoops, I told you to ship to the wrong address, can it be changed?
Yes! Just contact me *before I ship your order* and I will change your shipping address. If your order has already shipped, I cannot reroute it, but you are welcome to contact the shipping service to see if it can be delivered to the proper address. I do not offer refunds or replacements on products I ship to the address that I was provided. Please check your shipping address carefully on BOTH Etsy and PayPal.

🌿 Don't Gamble--insure your packages
If your package is lost and **IF** you paid for insurance I will file an insurance claim on it. That means you must ship Priority Mail in the US and International Priority Mail outside of it. Keep in mind that First Class International packages are NOT insured and may take up to 3 months to arrive if they are waylaid in Customs. If you choose not to insure a package, please keep in mind that once I send it I have no way to recover your losses if it never arrives or is very delayed. I understand international shipping is absurdly high, but please do not gamble with uninsured shipping unless you are willing to accept that it's a wash if your package does not arrive. If you are concerned about this, please upgrade to a form of postage that allows you to add insurance. I reserve the right to upgrade and add insurance if the value of the package is very high.

💌 Nobody wants my orders to get there faster and more without issue than I do, and you know I bust my tail to make you happy.

But the reality is that I am not Amazon, just one frazzled lady trying to keep up, and while I want to make sure as many of my packages get there as I humanly can, sometimes things go amiss, and what I don't have is the capacity (or financial fortitude) to re-ship infinite orders.

Please please, order early, make sure your packages are secure, and consider shipping with insurance or sign for delivery.

If there IS a problem please to reach out and I'll do my very best to help get you sorted. 🧡

$5 off as a HUGE thank you!

Because of your support NightBlooming earned the StarSeller badge for November! This is only possible because you support this one-woman business AND take the time to leave such caring, detailed 5-Star reviews.

We'll have to earn the badge monthly, so just know how much I appreciate every single review, even if it's on a product you've bought a million times before!

This happened because of you! Because you not only take the time to leave lovely reviews, but also tell other people about NightBlooming and The Iyarri Chronicles, and even give the things I make as gifts.

Use the code STARSELLERNOV to take $5 your next NightBlooming order this month (the code expires Nov 30, so don't wait!).

...or click here to apply the code!

Not sure what Star Seller is?

StarSeller is a recent program that Etsy rolled out that has sometimes made me behave like I've utterly lost my flipping mind. I talk about the insanity, but why it's still important for me to try to achieve it in this article.