Shipping in the age of COVID

Shipping with the USPS over the last few months has been a nightmare. I have no idea if it's because of COVID or because of this political stuff going on. I had to close down my Etsy shop for a couple of weeks because I had so many items lost in the mail that I lost almost $100, and I didn't want to risk having to send out any more replacement orders and losing more money. A lot of my tracking numbers looked like this one, that was missing from June 24th through August 3rd then suddenly delivered the next day, or this one, which apparently went directly from my front porch into a black hole in the mail truck. That second one was especially annoying because it was the first Keywork wallet I've sold. I'm still apprehensive to restock anything other than vinyl decals right now, but I can do porch pickups if you live locally. I took a little extra time to recover from COVID myself (which caused a ton of other problems) but I decided to finally reopen today. Thanks so much to everyone who has already been super patient with their orders disappearing into a USPS void. If it seems like things are still going missing or being delivered significantly late, I'll probably shut my shop down again. If you place an order, please be a little extra patient with the delivery time. USPS's website says that things will be delivered a minimum of one to two days late, and they're already telling people to mail in ballots two weeks early to make sure they arrive in time. If you're ordering a gift for someone or something that needs to be delivered by a certain time, I'd definitely plan on ordering it at least a week early. Remember to check each item description for its own creation and shipping time! As soon as you receive an email saying that your item has been shipped, I've dropped your item off at the post office and it's on the way to you. If you don't have a tracking number, you can sign up for Informed Delivery with the USPS so that you can see what items will be delivered to you each day, and make sure nothing is lost or stolen. If you have any questions about shipping, please email me at contact@deannatelles.com