Shipping and returns

This page covers where a parcel goes once you have paid, what happens if it goes wrong in transit, and how a refund is issued when one is owed. It should be read alongside our terms of sale, which the payment and warranty language here matches.

Where we ship

We ship to addresses in the United States only. We do not currently ship internationally.

Give us a street address where you can. Some carriers cannot deliver a parcel to a PO Box at all, and where the carrier we hand your order to is one of those, a PO Box address will delay or fail delivery rather than simply route around it.

Carriers and timelines

Parcels move through USPS and UPS service, booked through a shipping provider. We aim to hand an order to the carrier within one to two business days of payment confirming; that handling time comes before the carrier estimates below, not instead of them.

Standard shipping runs 2–4 business days in transit once the carrier has the parcel. Express shipping is quoted overnight. Both figures are carrier estimates, not guarantees — weather and a carrier’s own network disruptions can extend either window, and we do not control the carrier once a parcel leaves our hands.

We email a tracking link once your order ships. If a shipping confirmation email arrives without one, write to orders@vitrosciences.com with your order number and we will look it up.

Risk of loss and title

Title and risk of loss pass to you when we hand your parcel to the carrier, as our terms of sale state. That is a legal allocation of risk, not a statement that we stop caring what happens next — the two sections below set out what we do about a parcel a carrier refuses, loses, or delivers damaged.

Refused and undeliverable parcels

A parcel a carrier cannot deliver — a refused delivery, an address it cannot reach, or an address that turns out to be wrong — is typically returned to us rather than discarded. We do not control how a carrier routes an undeliverable parcel or how long that return takes.

Return freight on an undeliverable parcel is not something we absorb by default. Where the address you gave us was wrong or incomplete, reshipment is at your cost. Where the parcel was refused rather than misaddressed, email us and we will work out reshipment or a refund with you — the outcome depends on why the carrier could not deliver it, so we look at each case rather than applying one rule to all of them.

Cancellations

You can cancel an order any time before dispatch, and we refund it in full using the refund process below for the rail you paid on. Once we have handed a parcel to the carrier, the order has shipped and cancellation is no longer available — the returns and defect sections below cover what happens after that point instead.

Returns

We do not accept returns of material that has shipped. Once a parcel has left our custody, we cannot re-establish its storage conditions or its chain of custody, and reselling material we cannot vouch for would contradict the per-lot Certificate of Analysis our product warranty rests on. This is not a policy we apply reluctantly: a returned vial with a broken chain of custody is not the material the COA describes, and shipping it to another researcher under that COA would be dishonest about what they are receiving.

This is a refusal to take shipped material back, not a refusal to make an order right. The next section covers what we do when something about the order itself was wrong.

If something is wrong with your order

We replace or refund an order where the parcel arrived damaged, the wrong item was shipped, or the material does not match the Certificate of Analysis for its lot.

Tell us within 7 days of delivery, with photographs of the parcel, the item, and any damage. Email orders@vitrosciences.com with your order number. A report made after that window, or made without photographs, is harder for us to act on, because the evidence a carrier or our own warehouse would need to investigate is no longer available.

You can check the Certificate of Analysis for any lot yourself at /verify before you write to us — it is often the fastest way to confirm whether what you received matches what we shipped.

How refunds are issued

Neither payment rail refunds automatically or instantly. A person issues every refund by hand, which is why we ask for the detail above — it is what lets that person confirm what happened before money moves.

A crypto refund is sent manually and on-chain, at the original US-dollar value of the invoice rather than the asset amount you paid, and to the address the payment came from unless we agree a different one with you first. There is no automated refund path on the crypto rail: settlement is final, and the only way money moves back to you is a payment we send.

A Venmo refund is a manual transfer, matched by hand against your order and sent once we have confirmed it. Neither refund posts the moment we approve it — both take a person to send and the receiving side to clear.