Hey. This is Aviv from West Coast Shaving. Im glad that you liked the Grooming Dept shave soaps.
I wanted to respond to some of the shipping comments in the thread. Firstly, 15 days is really not acceptable from our standpoint, and I apologize that it did take so long to get to you.
I am not sure exactly when you ordered the shaving soaps, but we saw a slowdown from Fedex in the last two weeks where some packages were delayed 3 business days. I believe it is from the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday rush. Usually they are faster than that.
We moved our fulfillment back in house in September specifically because we wanted a better customer experience with delivery of the packages, including shipping timing. The longest shipping times are for packages over 1 pound that ship to the West Coast (we have been shipping from the East Coast since 2016 --- I know, the name makes it confusing). But over the past 3 months we have been able to:
- get packages out faster -- We got 98% of the Black Friday Weekend packages out by Monday night.
- better secure packages -- We are using biodegradable peanuts to provide extra cushion in all the boxes
- more personal touch -- We are able to address more customer requests that come in after the purchase is complete
We are a super small team of 10 people, including everyone at the warehouse. We ran 16 hour shifts for 8 days straight to make sure all the packages got out in time from the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday craziness.
Besides for shipping, we try to bring some great products to you guys through relationships that we have with different artisans/ vendors. Often times we are providing support to the vendors as well in the form of supplies, artwork, UPC's, etc... We hope that you feel that we are able to do that: great products with a great shopping experience online.
The truth is that the shipping loss that we have from shipping cost is one of the biggest expenses that we have as a business. Every year shipping costs go up, and our threshold for free shipping goes down. We are constantly working to provide that best shipping service that we can that will not destroy the business model. We are really happy with our FedEx relationship that we started about 6 months ago. They have been great with multiple pick ups in a day, great tracking visibility, and overall decent shipping times.
We appreciate the feedback. We really want to provide an excellent customer experience from end to end of the purchase. It is not always perfect with the shipping carriers, and I apologize for that.
I saw something on a documentary or news piece recently that even amazon isn't going to be able to sustain the free shipping. I too have noticed as mentioned above, that you get faster delivery when you pay for shipping. Somebody has to pay because you can't make free profitable on volume.
