Pricing and Shipping Policies
At the Dummy Place, we try to provide good value to our customers. While we review our pricing quarterly, we are reluctant to impose any price increases more then annually. Any increases will almost always be driven by our cost of raw material. Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), is a petroleum based product and is therefore subject to often volatile pricing. We know no one appreciates large jumps in pricing, so we will attempt to absorb what we can.
For less popular material thicknesses 1" and 3" we now price them the same as 2" and 4" respectively. This reflects the fact that it requires as much labor to cut, for example, a 10" round dummy from 1" material as from 2" material but the 1" item is basically cut on-demand since we don't often keep them in inventory due to low demand.
Because we like to reward our loyal following, we will from time to time offer specials or other deals. Watch for our e-newsletters for details.
Shipping cake dummies can be expensive. They are light yet bulky enough to exceed Postal Service and UPS size limits which puts them into the expensive 'dimensional weight' shipping category. At TDP, we are taking two important steps to try to combat this problem
Optimized Shipping - The TDP website employs a packing and shipping optimizer. When you are presented with shipping options, these are based on the optimizer attempting to find the best possible package configuration, i.e. the number, size and weight of packages, that requires the lowest fee from each service. This allows you to select which ever shipping option works best for you.
NOTE: If you receive a "No shipping options available" message, it means the composition of your order is such that human intervention will be needed to figure out the best packaging and shipping method. If this happens, please use the "Contact Us" to let us know. We'll work with you to get the order completed promptly.
Best Pricing - TDP takes full advantage of all discounted pricing available to us. Any discounts are passed through to the customer. We hope that as our business grows, so will our ability to obtain better discounts from our shippers. Sometimes, we have access to shipping discounts that the optimizer is unaware of at the time you place your order. We will automatically adjust your shipping costs down when these discounts result in any significant difference in shipping costs.
Processing and Shipping Time Policies
Orders are typically shipped within 1-3 business days, but for infrequently requested items, it might be as much as 5 days. This is what we refer to as processing time.
The shipping options you see in either the shopping cart viewer or at checkout provide shipping times obtained from the shippers based on shipping the items the day of the inquiry. They represent the number of working (a.k.a. delivery) days, for that shipper, that the package will be in transit.
You should work backwards from when you must have the items based on the processing + shipping time options in order to determine which option is right for you.USPS accept and delivers packages on Saturdays but not Sundays. (In some areas the USPS does contract deliveries for Amazon on Sundays. They don't deliver their own packages at the same time.)
UPS does not accept or deliver packages on Saturdays or Sundays. [NOTE: UPS does have special Saturday delivery but incurs an extra charge. Our shipping estimates for UPS do not include this. If you determine that you require UPS and Saturday delivery appears to be appropriate for you situation, please contact us.]
Feel free to use the Contact Us page to confirm timeframes on your order if you are uncertain about when to expect your items.
Customers should keep in mind that the more lead time we have before you need your items, the more likely we are to be able to use the lowest price services. Please plan ahead where ever possible.