Thanks to Amazon Prime, online consumers have come to expect free shipping as the norm whenever making a purchase.
While free shipping is within reach when purchasing smaller pieces of lab equipment and many lab consumables, when a laboratory buys larger lab equipment items, free shipping is not always a given.
Once a piece of laboratory equipment goes beyond the threshold for where ground shipping is feasible, the costs associated with shipping that lab equipment can climb quickly.
Typically laboratory equipment weighing up to about one hundred pounds can be shipped by UPS or FedEx ground at a relatively inexpensive rate with fairly reliable delivery times.
Examples of larger laboratory equipment pieces at the upper limit of ground shipping rates are our Accuris analytical and precision balances, Hermle Z206A, Hermle Z216M, Hermle Z306 and Labnet Prism R centrifuges.
The term to describe freight shipments beyond this weight is LTL, which stands for Less Than (full) Load; or items big enough to require a special delivery truck but not enough volume to fill up the entire truck.
When purchasing very large laboratory equipment items like CO2 incubators, ULT freezers or refrigerated cell-culture centrifuges, be prepared to answer the following questions which will determine if and what sort of delivery charges there might be.
Does your facility have a loading dock?
A loading dock is a receiving area with an unloading bay located a few feet off the ground that allows for an eighteen-wheel freight truck to pull up and unload.
This is the most cost efficient delivery method since the item can be picked up from the manufacturer and brought (usually) straight to your door in a single shot.
Do you require a lift-gate truck?
Smaller facilities that do not have a loading dock will most likely require delivery using a lift-gate truck.
A lift-gate truck is a smaller, usually secondary delivery vehicle which picks up the piece of lab equipment at a central receiving location after it has first been unloaded from the primary freight truck.
Each time a step is added, the cost for the delivery goes up. Depending on the size of the item, the location and how much labor is needed to complete the delivery, a lift-gate truck can add up to several hundred dollars to the final price for your large lab equipment.
Does your facility require inside delivery?
Also called "white-glove" delivery, inside delivery typically requires the delivery company to:
1. Bring the large lab equipment to the lab
2. Unpack and plug in the piece of equipment
3. Set up and install any pieces of accompanying hardware
4. Remove all packing materials and debris to leave the lab looking undisturbed.
This is the costliest option and while distributors can often absorb freight costs, inside delivery can run five-hundred dollars or more and usually must be added to the total cost.
Shoppers at Stellar Scientific often inquire whether or not the free shipping offer referenced on the pages of very large pieces of lab equipment is genuine.
We've dealt with this question in our FAQ section where we explain how it is necessary to turn off the shipping calculator so that Google does not add their own estimated shipping costs to our products when they crawl our website.
And, as noted there, we do make every effort to award free shipping whenever possible, even for items that must be shipped by freight.
Just the other week we were able to do so with a customer who ordered a Shel Lab SCO31, a large lab CO2 incubator that weighs over four-hundred pounds.
Since the customer was located in Southern California and our Shel Lab incubators are built in Cornelius, Oregon, the freight was so modest we were able to absorb the cost and not pass it along to the customer.
Just one more way Stellar Scientific makes purchasing even large laboratory equipment items simple and fast.