Shipping & live arrival
Live animals are not a normal parcel. Here is exactly how yours travels, and what happens if something goes wrong.
- Monday & TuesdayThe only two days we ship, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend.
- OvernightEvery live order. Flat $50, no matter where you are in the lower 48.
- Lower 48 onlyWe can't ship to Hawaii, Alaska or US territories.
- Heat or cold packChosen for the forecast at your address, not ours.
When your order ships
We ship Monday and Tuesday only. An order placed on a Wednesday goes out the following Monday. That is deliberate: a live animal handed to a carrier late in the week risks sitting in a sorting facility over the weekend, which is where most shipping losses actually happen.
You'll get tracking as soon as the label is made. Someone should be ready to bring the box inside promptly once it lands — an insulated box parked on a doorstep in full sun or a hard freeze is the one thing the packing can't protect against.
Weather
Each box is packed for the weather where it's going. A cold pack for a hot destination, a heat pack for a cold one, both inside an insulated container. If conditions at either end are bad enough that no amount of packing makes the trip safe, we'll hold your order and message you rather than ship it and hope. Holding for weather never costs you anything.
What shipping costs
Overnight shipping on any live animal is a flat $50, no matter where in the lower 48 you are — free on orders over $400. There is no separate handling charge and nothing is added afterwards.
Where we can't ship
We ship within the lower 48 states only. Orders to Hawaii, Alaska and US territories can't be accepted — the checkout will tell you at the ZIP step rather than taking your money first.
Some states and cities have their own rules about keeping particular invertebrates. Checking what applies where you live is your call to make before you order.
The live arrival guarantee
Every live animal we send is guaranteed to arrive alive. If yours doesn't, we'll make it right with a replacement or a refund.
To make a claim, we need two things:
- Photos, before anything is moved. Photograph the animal in the container it arrived in, along with the packaging and the label.
- Contact us within {{DOA_WINDOW}} of delivery, using the delivery time on the carrier's own tracking.
Send both to dakinverts@gmail.com and we'll sort it out.
The guarantee assumes the box was collected reasonably promptly and that the address you gave us was correct. A parcel refused, left uncollected, or sent to a wrong address is the one situation we can't cover — the full wording is in the terms.
Molting
An animal in premolt may be shipped a little later than planned. Moving a spider mid-molt is genuinely dangerous for it, so we wait. If that affects your order, we'll tell you rather than let it go quiet.