Dear Alaska Gold Customers,
The holiday season is upon us and it can make shipping perishable seafood a little more difficult, but a little planning is all we need to make it go as smoothly as possible. Here are Alaska Gold's holiday shipping recommendations and notes for customers:
The TLDR version of this note is that we strongly recommend ordering well in advance of when you (or your gift recipient) would like to receive our Alaska Gold Seafood order. And if you are concerned about what date your order will arrive, just reply to any of Alaska Gold's emails (order confirmations, newsletters, etc.) We will get back to you ASAP.
Here are the details on shipping our Alaska seafood during the holidays:
Again, please plan ahead and give yourself a cushion for a planned arrival date.
We really do not like last-minute orders--they frequently lead to disappointment for all parties. We are never going to win the fastest shipping company award. Please look elsewhere if you are looking for seafood last minute. We are 100% focused on customers who consistently love high-quality Alaska seafood year-round.
As a reminder, we ship the bulk of our frozen seafood orders Mondays, Tuesdays and in some cases Wednesdays and Thursdays. However, it’s possible that if you order on a Tuesday you might miss a shipping cut-off time for our shipping team if you live in a 3-day zone.
Shipping perishable items does present unique challenges and complicates shipping. Looking ahead to Thanksgiving, it is a shortened shipping week. With perishable items, we never ship out an item that might sit over the weekend or over a holiday, which means we have limited shipping days during the weeks with holdiays. That means that on Monday, November 24th we will be only shipping orders going to 1 and 2-day zones (scheduled arrival Wednesday before Thanksgiving) and on Tuesday the only orders going out will be orders going to 1-day zones. (We used to include a map on this note, but carrier transit times are constantly changing, so please reach out to us if you need any help figuring out when your order might arrive. Our strategically located shipping hubs are in Ohio and Reno to be as close to our customers as possible and the closer your shipping address is to those hubs the quicker you'll receive your order.)
Similarly, with Christmas and New Years Day falling on Thursdays this year, this means that those shipping weeks are also truncated.
If you're stuck and all of a sudden want to place a last minute order, we do have a RUSH shipping option that you can select at Checkout. Also, please bear in mind that when you select RUSH we won't be able to ship until the next available shipping date (Mondays through Thursdays), as we ship Mondays through Thursdays and do not offer Saturday delivery.
Frankly, we do not recommend using RUSH shipping. Our RUSH order fee is $125 because it is exorbitantly more expensive to ship overnight. We strongly recommend not placing orders with RUSH shipping unless you are absolutely desperate to receive an order before a specific date. We strongly encourage eating seafood year-round and not worrying about last-minute orders.
Again, if you are planning for arrival on a certain date, please also email us by replying to your order confirmation--that way we can confirm that we can make the deadline and do our best to shepherd the order through. We will do our best to make the shipping process as smooth as possible, but there are factors out of our control--weather, availability of dry ice, carrier capacity, etc.
Please have us deliver to a secure address. Our obligation is to ship your delicious seafood to the address you provide us. Please triple-check your shipping address at checkout and then again when you receive your email order confirmation. One digit wrong almost always leads to a delay of a day or more on the carrier end as they will have to find the package and re-sort it.
Also note: We will be backed up, as most of our packages need to get out Mondays and Tuesdays. And those Mondays and Tuesdays will be really busy for our shipping team. So just note that most likely your packages might not ship out as fast as usual during these holiday months.
Again, please let us know via email if there’s a certain day you are hoping for as an arrival date, we’ll do our best to accommodate. Just send us an email with your order number or, better yet, just hit reply on your order confirmation email, and we will do our best to meet the delivery date you request.
Bear in mind, we include enough dry ice to keep your perishable seafood item frozen for scheduled time of transit, plus an additional day should there be any delay.
Another important note is that canned seafood items ship separately from frozen seafood items and ship ground by default, so arrival could be up to 10 days after order depending on location and carrier.
Again, our advice is always to plan ahead and give yourself some cushion for any planned events. The frozen seafood will stay in good condition in your freezer for 6 months, so ordering early is always better than late!
