Dimensional Weight - A New Spin on Shipping Charges
Corporate greed or just a sign of the times? We are working to ship orders as affordably as possible.

UPS and FedEx rates are now based not only on the weight of a box but also the size. This concept is often called "dimensional weight". Essentially it means that a large, light-weight box will be charged at a weight much greater than the physical weight of the package. Using their new method, our most common box size (24" x 14" x 14") will be charged at the 28lb rate.

We stock almost 4,000 products in our shop and there are hundreds of millions combinations of products that could be ordered on our site. As you can probably imagine, I ship a lot of large, light-weight boxes (veneer!) and this new policy kept me awake for countless nights. I worked with FedEx for several months to figure out how we could manage this profit-driven policy.

There are no perfect solutions to this new dimensional weight issue but I've done my best. I have gone through an extensive amount of theorizing, testing, and evaluating to find a way of making shipping as affordable as possible for our customers. We don't want to make a single penny from the shipping part of your order.

Here is What We've Done

• We were able to get FedEx to slightly increase the dimensional weight divisor so that we don't get hit with a 28 lb shipping rate for our larger boxes. They lowered it by about 10 lbs. I'd say this was a step in the right direction.
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• After countless hours of haggling with the carriers, I was able to negotiate a decent discount on ground shipments and I've coded our website to pass every bit of the discount on to our customers.
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• The next change I made was to our website and how it calculates the shipping weight on an order. For all raw wood veneers that are sold by the sheet or lot, we set the weight of the item using the dimensional weight of the box we expect to use when we ship this veneer, but if you order more than one of that exact veneer product then we do not charge any additional weight for the shipment. See the example #1 below for more information.
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• If you place an order using a customer account, we will refund any significant difference between the website shipping charge and our cost to package/ship your order. See example #2 below.
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