Homemade Soaps FAQ

Back orders

You may notice if you order multiples of a single type of product that some of your order is on back order - you'll receive a notification when you add the out of stock items to your cart, which will tell you exactly how many items are on back order. Not to worry - if you're able to back order it, then we probably have the materials at hand to make your order up immediately - we've just sold everything we had in stock, or it's an item we don't like having sit around on the shelf too long - we like to make sure our products go out to the customer with a minimum 1 year life expectancy, so we keep stock at an appropriate level to insure a quick turn around time between manufacture and sale. If there will be more than a 3 day delay in shipping due to the back order (perhaps 10 of your 20 body butters are on back order, and we have just run out of shea butter, which won't be delivered for a week) we will contact you and let you know how long we estimate that delay to be. If it's longer than you want to wait, that's no problem - we'll work out whatever works best for you, including an immediate refund, if that's what you'd like.

Or, if you are ordering a really large number of items (30 lotions in back order, for example) and your credit card company puts a 3 day hold on refunded payments but you don't want to wait that long, you can always contact us before you complete your order, and we can tell you how long it's going to take to fill the back order before you ever send payment.

Refunds

We are always happy to refund your money, when it is reasonable. If you've made an accident in your order amount and need a partial refund ("help! I wanted 3 lip balms, not 30!") send us an email immediately and we will correct your order and refund you the extra money. Our shopping cart is set up to help prevent such things, but we know, sometimes things (like "helpful" children and pets on the keyboard) happen.

We are also happy to refund your money if you somehow get a defective product. Examples of a defective product include opened, spilled or crushed products - after the anthrax scare several years ago, it was 8 months before we could consistently guarantee delivery of items like bath fizzies, for example - the high glycerin content in our soaps would set off the "bomb sniffers" at the post office and either we would receive the box back, full of opened and crushed bath bombs that had been "tested" by the Feds, or worse, the customer would get that box full of spilled, opened and destroyed products.

However, "I tore the label when I removed the protective tape" is not a defective product. Nor is "I tried it and decided I don't care for ylang ylang. I never liked it before, but I thought yours might be different." (Yes, I am sad to say, these are both real examples of reasons someone wanted to return products for a full refund.)

We also cannot take returns on soap. Our soaps are not fully sealed in a wrapper - the packaging you see on our site is the packaging it comes in. This allows it to breath and continue curing as it ages, hardening and becoming longer lasting and better lathering as time goes by. This means, though, that once it leaves our hands, it's yours - so please, please do not order 10 bars of a scent you've never tried before, because you may end up with 10 bars of soap you're going to have to give as gifts, since you don't want to use it. As a product that is intended to be used on bare skin, we just can't take it back and reshelf it - anything could have been done to it after it leaves our door. This is just common safety sense. Again - if your soap was destroyed in transit, we will make sure you get a refund. We try to insure everything, so the post office will be liable for such damages. But just not liking something is not the same as "defective" or "unusable".

Shipping

Shipping is expensive. I know, I know, it kills me too. So let me explain how we get our shipping costs.

We ship everything via USPS, and the postal service shipping calculator is plugged directly into our shopping cart. Each time shipping is calculated, it goes out to the USPS website and plugs in the weight, plus our zip code and your zip code, and sends back the actual cost from the postal service. We have added on one additional dollar ($1.00), to account for the weight of the packaging materials - boxes, packing paper and tape all add weight to the shipment - and the cost of the tape and packing paper.

Sensible shopping will help you save on shipping. Please remember that shipping price breaks are at the one pound mark. It costs the same amount to ship 1 - 2 oz bottle of body, room and linen spray as it does to ship 4 of them. Or one body spray, a bar of soap, and 3 perfume balms. Get where I'm going with this? You can always click on the "my cart" link at the top of every page, and use the "estimate shipping and tax" item to find out what your shipping cost will be - play with the quantities on your purchase to get an idea - one bar of soap costs $5.90 to ship to someone in my zip code from my zip code, but it's only 10 cents more to ship 4 bars.