WE HAVE TO COST AVERAGE THE SHIPPING. HERE'S WHY.

1. Time and materials to pack the items.

2. Cost in time and fuel to get the packages to the Post Office or UPS drop off.

3. In a perfect (Amazon and other monster outfits) world where "sku's" are bar coded, they have posssibly hundreds of employees, products are saved in a database with the shipping weight, and they have a deal with UPS to ship stuff at fractions of the rates charged the average small business - their freight charges can be figured according to the database, added into the shopping cart, and you can see them up front. That is impossible for us as some of our parts may be drop-shipped and we have no clue as to the weight as shipped. We have available nearly any part still being made by someone (this comes to many thousands of items). Additionally, weights and dimensions for most parts are not available to us in any sort of file we could use to cost out our shipments individually. Trying to do this by hand for every outgoing package would take more time than we possibly have in the course of a normal day.
For instance, a 4-cylinder Force head gasket properly boxed will cost a lot more to ship than say, 3 or 4 smaller items of equal weight, but of less size and fragility.

The easiest way for us to maximize our useful time is to try to pick a number that is mostly fair for the average order and use it as a flat rate. In many cases the actual shipping is greater than the $8.75 - in fact we recently had to increase it 2 bucks a pop as we were on the loss side of the curve. The Post Office has raised rates considerably in the last year or so.

Hope this helps in understanding the reasons for this shipping amount!


A list of current policies and rates is here (opens in a new window).

ALL CUSTOMERS:  For EXPRESS MAIL to anywhere, please CONTACT US so we can let you know what it will cost to ship. This will vary according to weight & dimensions of the necessary packaging (you can get a good idea from the page linked above).

We prefer NOT to ship orders outside the USA by any service besides Priority or Express Mail since other carriers are more expensive and we don't have drop-off locations close by.


INTERNATIONAL PAYPAL CUSTOMERS:
If you do not follow the request for us to generate an invoice for Priority Mail when using PayPal from outside the USA for parts larger than maybe a thick hardback book, your order MAY NOT be shipped immediately since we can not add additional shipping if needed to PayPal payments (this should be obvious). We would have to ask for extra shipping funds, delaying the entire process of getting your order out to you as quickly as possible.