Many Websites promise free shipping (with or without some sort of caveat attached), and you may wonder why the Tuba Exchange does not offer free shipping?

Well, it is a well-kept secret that “free shipping” is really not free,

but is always, in some shape or form, actually included in the price.

There are a number of reasons why we do not offer free shipping:

1. Our instruments are bulky and delicate.

They are too large to ship via US Postal Service, so they must ship via motor freight/truckline. They also require special packaging, heavy duty cardboard, and then we also palletize our shipments. By doing so, we can rest assured the instruments are handled by pallet jacks and forklifts, which is much safer, and this also insures the packages are not multi or double stacked.

2. We ship all over the country.

If we would include shipping costs in our pricing to cover every destination in the USA, the pricing (if we included the free shipping) would be very unfair to our customers in the eastern part of the USA, because we would be charging them the same averaged price that a customer on the west coast would pay. By separating the shipping charge, we are able to calculate actual shipping costs to your destination zip code rather than some averaged cost included in the sales price.

3. Some customers buy multiple instruments.

The total shipping cost for more than one instrument is always cheaper on a per instrument basis because we can put more than one instrument on a pallet. Again, IF we used an averaged freight charge included in the pricing of each instrument to cover the so-called “free shipping”, you would basically be paying double for shipping. This is not equitable in our estimation, which is why we separate the shipping charges from our instrument pricing.

Please send any feedback as we always welcome your comments!