Can I Ship Gardening Tools?

Some gardening tools like pruning shears and digging forks are fairly sharp, leading some shippers to question whether carriers consider these tools a potential liability. As is the case with shipping knives, gardening tools aren’t deemed hazardous. Therefore, you can ship gardening tools domestically with any service from any major carrier!

Table of Contents

• Any Carrier Will Allow You to Ship Handheld Gardening Tools
• Use Proper Packaging Procedures to Ensure Safety
• What About Sending Gardening Tools Internationally?
• Save Time & Money on These Shipments With Online Shipping Software

Any Carrier Will Allow You to Ship Handheld Gardening Tools

The major carriers in the U.S. (USPS, UPS, and FedEx) don’t restrict shipments containing gardening tools. As we said before, shipping carriers don’t deem these items as hazardous materials that you can only send via ground transportation services. Therefore, you can use any domestic service—either ground- or air-based—to send gardening tools within the United States. Some examples of popular domestic shipping services at your disposal are:

• USPS Ground Advantage
• USPS Priority Mail
• USPS Priority Mail Express
• UPS Ground
• UPS Next Day Air
• FedEx Ground

Learn more about hazardous materials and how to ship them.

Use Proper Packaging Procedures to Ensure Safety

Since many of these tools are sharp objects, we recommend exercising caution when handling them and using ample protective packing material to ensure that they don’t harm your recipient. Some examples of packing materials that can protect recipients from sharp objects are styrofoam sheets, air pillows, and bubble wrap that you can wrap around the sharp ends of your tools. Lastly, be sure you use enough packing tape to secure this cushioning tightly so that it doesn’t get removed from the sharp point of the tools during transit.

What About Sending Gardening Tools Internationally?

Most foreign countries don’t have any import restrictions on items like gardening tools or other sharp, non-hazardous objects. However, the customs departments of some countries may consider these items as weapons. If this is the case, a country may prohibit gardening tools from entering its borders.

Before you purchase any shipping labels for overseas-bound packages containing gardening tools, we suggest checking the USPS individual country listings and navigating to your desired destination. This is the quickest way to determine if the country you plan to ship to allows for these shipments!

Save Time & Money on These Shipments With Online Shipping Software

No matter which shipping service you opt for, you should never purchase your labels at your local Post Office or UPS Store. When you do, you’ll end up paying retail prices for your postage. Instead, you’ll save much more money when you take advantage of deep discounts through online shipping software solutions.

Shipping software companies sell postage from carriers like USPS and UPS at deep discounts that are typically only available for shippers sending upwards of 50,000 packages per year. When you buy postage through these shipping software companies, you automatically get access to those same discounts! For USPS, this tier of discounts is referred to as Commercial Pricing. In some cases, purchasing a label at Commercial Pricing rates can save you up to 89% off what you’d pay to ship the same package at your local Post Office!

On top of the huge savings, another benefit of using shipping software to buy postage is that you can do so without ever leaving your home or office. You can buy and print the labels from your computer, and you can even schedule pickups for your packages to inject them into your carriers’ network. Not only do you save tons of money through pre-negotiated discounts, but you also save time by skipping the lines at the Post Office or your local UPS Store.