Shipping & Returns

Shipping rates

We do not ship internationally at this time. U.S.-based customers will have their completed orders shipped via USPS with a tracking number, at a tabled rate starting at $4.95 for packages under a pound. There is also a 1% handling charge. Total weight is listed at the top of your cart before you checkout. For those who might be wondering, our shipping rate tables were derived as a median average based upon the customers we have all across the country, while still trending reasonably with real-life USPS rates. We're hoping that future software updates will allow us to streamline the shipping charges even better, but that's a while out right now. Product weights were researched accordingly, in addition to spending some quality time with our own on-hand inventory and a scale. Once your order has been shipped and a USPS tracking number provided, we are unable to provide any assistance in locating lost or delayed packages. STNA does do not have access to any other tracking information beyond what is provided. If your package appears to be lost or delayed, please contact your local USPS post office or mail carrier for further assistance.

Shipping methodology during sale events (and weekends)

We are a small shop, so we collect all customer orders for the duration of a sale (or a weekend) and place our own cumulative orders with our distributors after the sale (or weekend) has ended. We typically categorize 'weekend orders' as any placed on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. This will likely extend your turnaround time, especially if you place your order on Sale/Weekend Day #1 and/or an item happens to need to be re-stocked or special ordered. If all of your items ARE actively on-hand, we DO NOT wait until the sale event concludes to ship your items. If we have everything, we ship everything.

Inventory availability and expectations

The products listed in the catalog are what we can acquire for you from our variety of vendors, not necessarily what's actively in-stock for immediate shipment (short of Specials and Clearance items). As much as we’d like to, we don't always have everything immediately on-hand for everyone all of the time to ship at a moment's notice. Not everyplace can be Amazon, sorry. Most of our on-hand inventory is based upon historical purchase records, not a crystal ball. While, for example, we DO have a significant array of floss and fabric on-hand, there are thousands of combinations of possibilities. Some products are simply more popular, while others have never been purchased during the years we've been in business. If/when we DO need to order an item, most of our vendors are extraordinarily prompt with their fulfillment. The majority of items from our primary distributors (Hoffman, Notions Marketing and YarnTree) are usually sent to us in a week or two, if we happen to not have it readily on-hand. Please be aware that orders to dyers themselves for re-stocks have a typical turn-around time measured in weeks, if the vendor needs to prepare a fresh batch. The exceptions so far are WDW, MYS and FBS, who dye everything on-demand and their turnaround times are closer to multiple months.

Catalog updates and the possibility of encountering discontinued/out-of-print products

New releases are added to our catalog weekly, the bulk of which typically happens over a weekend in preparation for the Monday newsletter and usually encompasses updates from a multitude of distribution points. Only ONE of our major distributors publishes an out-of-print/discontinued report and it's on a monthly basis. As you can imagine, when wholesalers only provide a list of new products, but not a list of discontinued ones, data integrity suffers and makes the accuracy of product availability rather awkward to maintain on our end, even with periodic reviews. We're extremely diligent about removing discontinued items from our catalog as soon as we find out about them, in an effort to avoid the embarrassing situation of a customer placing an order that we cannot fulfill. Nobody wants to be caught in that situation, especially shopkeepers. However, oversights CAN happen, especially when dealing with tens of thousands of products scattered across numerous distribution sources. Please be assured that we are doing our best with what info we DO have access to to keep our catalog as accurate as possible. Please also know that we're just as frustrated as you are (if not more) to discover that, without notice or warning, a product is suddenly no longer available. All we can ask for is your understanding and patience, that the world isn't perfect and occasional inventory oversights can happen.

Matching up dye-lots

As a stitcher, you are aware that dye lots vary. If purchasing multiple items in one color (ex. floss), we will be diligent in sending all from the same dye lot. We might even reach out to ask you if it’s ok if they don’t match, as many stitchers are ordering for different projects and aren’t always concerned about the dye-lots matching. Please feel free to leave a comment along those lines in your order, if it applies to you! Depending on the quantity ordered, sometimes this may require us to place an order with a vendor to ensure dye-lot consistency. Lastly, many (not all) thread dyers offer larger-scale bulk put-ups. That is, if you want 50+ yards for a ginormous monochrome and don't want to deal with a small mountain of individual skeins/spools (who does?!), please feel free to send us a note to check first. It's entirely possible that we can submit a custom order for you, if you don't already see a bulk option listed in the catalog.

Payments and Transaction Security

We accept most major credit cards, and PayPal. In either case, all payment transactions are handled via the respective merchant processing gateway(s). Cards are charged at the time of purchase, it's not a quote or an estimate. Any discounts or taxes will already be applied by the time you're ready to checkout. For the financial security of our customers (and ourselves), we DO NOT maintain your payment information "on file" for later use, nor do we process transactions manually, whether submitted by phone, e-mail, or carrier pigeon. Transaction security is something we take very seriously at STNA. Credit card fraud is no joke and financial institutions are cracking down with tighter safeguards with increasing frequency. Please be aware that when your shipping address does not match your billing address, all major card issuers flag it as a potentially fraudulent transaction. In the grand scheme, WE don't have any issue with this practice (we use different billing/shipping addresses ourselves), but YOUR card issuer certainly has an issue with it, when names or addresses don't match anything they have on-record for you. Reconciling these types of payment account discrepancies is the responsibility of the card holder, not the retailer. However, if the fraud alerts persist (and a customer's address disparities on invoices are THE first thing that dispute investigators ask for documentation about, btw), we won't hesitate to activate a more rigid enforcement of matching your shipping/billing addresses. It will result in transactions being automagically declined at checkout if your billing/shipping addresses aren't the same, no questions asked, no exceptions. Again, we take transaction security seriously here at STNA, we'd really prefer not to take the needless business hit that such an enforcement would obviously incur, but transaction security is not a trivial matter. Whether we resort to cranking the transaction security dial up to 11 is completely out of our hands - it's in yours. Lastly, speaking of 'not matching', our name on your statement *might* actually show up as JaySez LLC, which is the parent company for STNA. There's nothing nefarious going on over here - it's a common practice for shopowners to legally isolate business from personal assets with an LLC. We're hoping this info will stave off any payment disputes stemming from "I don't remember buying anything at some JaySez store... DISPUTE!" We have no way of knowing what your financial institution prints on your statements - some use JaySez, some use String Theory Needlearts. It's a total mystery as to what their deciding factor is, which is why you're being advised to be on the lookout for it.

We are unable to append to an order

For security purposes (yours AND ours), our payment processors don't provide us with any visibility to your payment info. Once an order is placed, there's no way to 'add' to a completed transaction because A. you've already paid for it and B. payment details (i.e. credit card numbers) aren't stored anywhere for us to re-use. If you order the wrong quantity, or simply forgot to add an item to your cart, you'll need to place a fresh order for the stragglers, please. In those cases, the shipping differences for one of the back-to-back orders will be reimbursed to you in the form of a store credit or a coupon code for use on a future purchase, and your orders will be combined for shipping.

Return Policy

We will NOT accept any returns of charts, kits, magazines or other similar media items, due to copyright concerns. We DO, however, consider exchanges on a case-by-case basis for unused fabric, so please feel free to ask and we’ll discuss your particular return situation! (Common context: “ This isn’t the shade I thought it would be, can I exchange it for something darker/lighter/etc.? ”). Any monetary reimbursements to customers for such exchanges are handled via store credit. Customers are responsible for any shipping costs for returns.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to ask!