Midway USA's Nitro Express Shipping System

[Termite]

I've been ordering from Midway for.........well............before there was an internet, and all orders were phone-in or truly "mail order", paid for with check or M.O.
This is just one more reason why I respect Larry Potterfield and his staff.
LINK

Thank you, Larry, for the [strike]years[/strike] decades of service to the shooting community, and your tireless support of the Second Amendment.

[Netpackrat]

I dunno... From up here, shipping from Midway has been a little more of a pain over the last year or so. The website seems to keep getting to be more obtuse, and I have to be careful or it will default to a more expensive shipping option than I would normally use. I actually dumped a couple shopping carts worth of stuff on different occasions, and ordered from their competitors before I figured out what it was doing.

And of course it isn't really Midway's fault, but the trend now seems to be shipments changing carriers at least once while in transit. The effect of this is to render tracking useless, and you have no recourse once your package enters that black hole. You've got little choice but to just wait and hope it shows up.

[Dub_James]

I got an email from Midway this morning saying they've revamped their shipping system. Looks like they got rid of the odd handling fees they used to have. I'll check it out later to see how it works.

I've not bought from them for a few years now, mainly because of the odd (and at times, overly expensive) shipping costs.

[PawPaw]

Midway pissed me off in February, when I ordered their range bags. They were running a sale, and I decided to snag four of them to give away as birthday presents.

Evidently, their manufacturing shop boxes each bag in its own shipping box, and when Midway gets an order, they slap a label on it and throw it in the truck. So, I paid four shipping costs, one for each bag. That made the deal not such a screaming deal. It was okay, buy I ordered four bags and paid four shipping costs.

I agree that generally, Larry Potterfield does a tremendous service to the shooting community, provides good gear, and has built quite a company, while supporting the shooting community and the NRA, but those shipping costs on those bags took me by surprise.

[NVGdude]

I used to order from Midway back when they had FREE shipping. (ok, nothing is free, call it included then). Heck my old "Midway" tumbler is still going strong and I must have bought that thing back in 1992 or so.

In the past few years their shipping has been on the "rape your dead corpse" side of things, and I have often dumped my cart and bought from Mid-south or Graffs instead once everything totaled up.

I actually ordered last week and came close to dumping the cart again once the shipping was totaled in, but decided I wanted the stuff just barely enough to choke down $20 in shipping on $70 worth of stuff.

Hopefully this really does reverse the trend. I'm guessing that actually having components in stock on the other hand, would simply be asking far too much.

[Netpackrat]

I just looked at their new shipping scheme. Yeah...

Fuck Midway.

$5.99 standard ground shipping sounds great, until they add the new additional $10 "fuck you for living in Alaska" fee. And under the new standard shipping regime, I have no way to prevent it from going UPS. If that's the way they are going to be, I am done with them.

[Dub_James]

Looks like basic shipping is $3.99 where I am, which is a big improvement over the $15 dollars it used to be. I figure they were having their lunch eaten by places with less complicated shipping regimes.

Ordered some carrier keys. Price was good, and they're beating any other place on shipping; even Ebay.

[Erik]

Midway charges $18 for shipping here. (From their local company, not from the US company)
And they only ship out thursdays, so if you order after lunch on thursday, they wont send it until a week later.

Not really impressive, standard shipping charges from most online companies here are $7, and a lot of them has no shipping fee at all as long as you order a minimum amount. And the prices they charge is really not competitive either, so even though they have the best selection of gear available here, I tend to avoid them.
I'm sure there's a reason for their policies, but I really cant imagine what that could be.

[BDK]

My guess is their operation in Sweden is a small warehouse and a couple employees who pull all duties, and shipping is scheduled to be done on Thursday.

[Erik]

Yeah, I kind of figure something like that. But considering that there are a lot of other small companies with just a warehouse and a few employees (if they even have employees) that have far less selection in stock, and they manage to send overnight free of charge, I don't really buy that as a good reason. They should be able to improve on it if they wanted to.