Shipping & Live Arrival.

When your order ships

We ship Tuesday and Wednesday only, in one batch a week, and your order goes out on the Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week. Order on a Monday or order on a Saturday — either way, it ships the next week. There is no cut-off to catch and no guessing.

Which of the two days it goes out depends on how many boxes are moving that week, so we name the window rather than promise a single date. Shipping early in the week is deliberate: a live animal handed to a carrier late in the week risks sitting in a sorting facility over the weekend, which is where most shipping losses actually happen.

You'll get an email with tracking as soon as the label is made. Someone should be ready to bring the box inside promptly once it lands — an insulated box parked on a doorstep in full sun or a hard freeze is the one thing the packing can't protect against.

Weather

Each box is packed for the weather where it's going. A cold pack for a hot destination, a heat pack for a cold one, both inside an insulated container. If conditions at either end are bad enough that no amount of packing makes the trip safe, we'll hold your order and message you rather than ship it and hope. Holding for weather never costs you anything, and you can cancel a held order for a full refund if you'd rather not wait.

What shipping costs

Overnight shipping on a live animal is priced by how far the box has to travel, so you see the real figure once you enter your ZIP at checkout — never an estimate that changes later. There is no separate handling charge and nothing is added afterwards.

Supplies ordered on their own ship at a lower flat rate. Supplies ordered alongside a tarantula ride along in the same box at no extra cost.

Where we can't ship

We ship within the lower 48 states only. Orders to Hawaii, Alaska and US territories can't be accepted — checkout will tell you at the ZIP step rather than taking your money first.

Some states and cities have their own rules about keeping particular invertebrates. Checking what applies where you live is your call to make before you order.

The live arrival guarantee

Every live animal we send is guaranteed to arrive alive. If yours doesn't, we'll make it right with a replacement on the next safe ship date or a refund of the price of the animal.

To make a claim, we need two things:

1. Photos, before anything is moved. Photograph the animal in the container it arrived in, along with the packaging and the label.
2. Contact us within 2 hours of delivery, measured from the delivery time on the carrier's own tracking.

Send both to jurassictarantulas@gmail.com and we'll sort it out.

You need to be there to accept the box. The guarantee assumes the package was taken on the first delivery attempt — or collected from the carrier's hold location the same day — and that the address you gave us was correct. A parcel refused, left uncollected, redelivered, or sent to a wrong address is the one situation we can't cover. The full wording is in the terms.

One thing worth knowing before you panic: a tarantula that arrives limp, curled or barely moving is very often just cold or stressed, not dead, and frequently comes back around within a day. Send us photos and ask — inside the two-hour window — before assuming the worst.

Molting

An animal in premolt may be shipped a little later than planned. Moving a spider mid-molt is genuinely dangerous for it, so we wait. If that affects your order, we'll tell you rather than let it go quiet.

Listings show the last recorded molt date where we have one, so you can see roughly where in its cycle an animal is before you buy.