As is clearly stated on our homepage - the "No Bull" guarantee applies to registered mail only. Here's the reason for this :
Registered mail means we can track an order. I can't count the amount of times someone e-mails us to say their package hasn't turned up - we check the tracking and it tells us a delivery was attempted, no-one was home, and the order is waiting at the post office for collection, so the customer goes and picks it up and all is well. This is just one example - without tracking we wouldn't be able to ascertain what had happened to that order, and would've re-sent $xxx amount of seeds at a cost to ourselves when we've already shipped them, successfully, to the correct address! We are a relatively small business and do not have bottomless pockets, nor a never-ending supply of free seeds which we can continually ship out for nothing. We also, unfortunately, get a minority of unscrupulous people who would like us to re-send seeds which have already arrived - we know this because we've even had people use registered mail and then e-mail to say their seeds didn't arrive, demanding a re-send, when a quick check of the tracking shows that they signed for the order, in their name, at their address! Suffice to say we don't get any further response from them once we point this out.....it goes without saying the overwhelmingly majority of our customers are straight-up, honest types (the honesty of some is actually phenomenal at times, every now and again we'll get somebody e-mailing to say they got too many seeds by error, and want to know the address to send them back to!), but there are always people who want to take advantage of others, and registered mail protects us against the financial loss associated with that.
Standard shipping is $7.50. Registered/guaranteed is $15. So you're actually paying $7.50 extra, not $17. Bear in mind we are shipping everything first-class airmail!
