"I've been on other sites and some of them offer "Free Shipping" and while I love your selection and prices, I don't want to pay for anything that I don't have to..."

The "Free Shipping" concept is an offer made by some of our "competitors" which we believe to be a rather misleading advertisement for several reasons. The first is that shipping is never "free" in fact nothing "real" is ever free, you might not realize that you're paying for it, but you're paying for it in the form of a higher selling price. We're not just "playing with words" here, we're stating a fact. It is a violation of the Federal Trade Commission to advertise anything as being "free" when in fact the consumer is paying for it in one way or another. This is why automobile dealerships had to change their marketing strategies a few years ago and stop advertising "free 24" television with purchase" because in fact the television wasn't "free" because the cost of the television was being added into the final selling price of the automobile.

The reality is that most of the companies offering that service are banking on the fact that they hope you are going to keep the stone. You see it works like this… When we buy a diamond or group of diamonds from any of the diamond cutters we work with, they pay the shipping for any diamonds that we keep, but we pay the shipping for any diamonds that we return. Since most of the internet diamond dealers never actually see the diamonds that they sell, they simply have them drop shipped from their suppliers to their customers, the “free shipping” they offer is actually the free shipping they receive from the diamond cutter and only have to pay if you return the stone. Since we insist on personally evaluating every diamond that we sell, we incur shipping charges when we send the diamonds out to our clients and since our profit structure is actually quite minimal we ask our clients to pay that expense.

Perhaps it would be easier to increase the selling price of the diamonds slightly and offer “free shipping” but it just doesn’t “pencil out” in our minds from a perspective of integrity. Here’s a fun experiment that many of our clients have benefited from. Call one of those companies offering “free shipping” and ask them if they have the diamond that you are considering in their physical possession. Then ask them for clarity photographs, DiamCalc results and an OGI or Sarin computerized proportions analysis issued in the full page report format. Most of our clients have been told that it will cost an additional $150.00 to provide that service. Then ask them who pays the "free shipping" if you decide to return the stone to them for a refund. If past experience is any indication of the answer we expect you to receive, you'll be told that "shipping charges will be deducted from your refund in the event that you return the stone". So much for “free shipping” because in reality is it nothing but a myth.

Now, we can reduce the shipping cost by changing the method of shipping, we prefer to ship by Fed Ex Priority which costs $57.00 for $6,000.00 of coverage. Less for diamonds of lower value and more for diamonds of a higher value, about nine dollars of the shipping charge is actually for freight charges. The total cost of shipping decreases by about $20.00 if we use Second Day Air, but the maximum insurance coverage is limited to $10,000.00 and the total cost of shipping drops to about $15.00 if we use U.S. Registered & Insured Mail which takes 5 – 7 days, but not many people want to wait that long to receive their diamond after sending us money.