Tether Products, Male Expression and Self-gratification Thru Innovation

 

Payment, Sales Tax, Shipping & Returns

Payment

Tether Products currently uses PayPal, a secure and internationally recognized e-commerce business and financial intermediary, to process all online transactions. No other form of payment is presently accepted. To use PayPal and the Add to Cart & View Cart buttons displayed on the Order Pages, you must have JavaScript enabled.

There is no cost to Tether Products’ customers for making payments thru PayPal and you do not have to set up an account with PayPal to do so. PayPal is simply a financial intermediary (an agent or payment gateway), useable by anyone, and accepts all major credit and debit cards, as well as payment by other means such as e-checks or wire transfers (depending on where you live and whether you have a PayPal account), assuring Tether Products’ customers of complete confidentiality, as well as added protection if a shipment is lost or a dispute arises. There is no cost to Tether Products’ customers for making payments thru PayPal, other than the normal fees (if any) that may be charged by the customer’s own bank or credit/debit card for making the payment to PayPal, and all transactions are handled by PayPal’s own secure servers. At no time does Tether Products ever have access to customers’ sensitive private information like account numbers, passwords and credit card information. You therefore never have to worry that Tether Products' own security could be breached by malicious hackers, as there is nothing to gain by doing so.

International customers should note that all prices and charges appearing on this website are in United States dollars (USD) and payments for international orders will be automatically converted to USD during processing at the then applicable exchange rate determined by PayPal. Tether Products pays a fee to PayPal for making such currency conversions, in addition to the normal transaction fee it pays for all purchases, and will in certain instances deduct these fees from any refunds that are made. Please see the Customer Service & Customer Feedback page for further details.

Sales Tax

Tether Products has a physical presence in California, USA and is thereby legally obligated to collect sales taxes from California residents and pass them on to the State government. State and local sales taxes of 7.75% will be added to all orders shipped to California addresses. No sales tax is collected by Tether Products on out-of-state or international orders, but customers should be aware that they may have a legal obligation to remit such taxes themselves.

Notwithstanding its legal obligation, Tether Products believes that, in principle, sales and use taxes are a disgraceful and unfair form of double taxation that inequitably burdens low-income people the most, and that the pressing issue should not be whether Internet businesses should be forced to collect them (ostensibly to level the playing field with brick & mortar businesses and to aid the State in tax collection), but whether they should even exist in the first place. With the Internet option of buying out-of-state or from foreign businesses becoming more prevalent every day, sales taxes are doomed to become increasingly more avoidable or impossible to fully collect, causing ever-greater imbalances. Current proposed legislation that would force large Internet businesses to collect taxes while exempting small businesses, will only exacerbate this inequity. Tether Products encourages its customers, not to simply pick sides in the looming battle over whether any Internet businesses should have to collect sales taxes, but rather to seek and support alternate tax strategies (tax reform) whereby sales taxes at the point of sale might simply be eliminated or replaced by something else. Unless sales taxes are collected on all transactions by all businesses, large or small, regardless of what state you live in and whether or not the business has a physical presence in that state, and unless governments find an equitable way to share those revenues (yeah, right, that’s gonna happen), replacing sales taxes by some alternate form of taxation is the only way to guarantee a level and fair playing field for all (including the tax man).

On the matter of tax reform, Tether Products believes that only excess income above what is necessary to sustain a reasonable standard of living, should ever be taxed (give poor people a break). This principle is already embedded in the tax codes, but not very uniformly or equitably (certainly not when it comes to sales taxes).

Shipping & Handling

Tether Products uses the United States Postal Service (USPS) to ship all products and will ship to any foreign destination that has mail service covered by cooperative agreements with the USPS and that is within PayPal's supported countries and regions. Shipping labels are automatically printed verbatim by PayPal from the customer's input, so please be careful in using the correct format, spelling and punctuation (all upper-case lettering is preferred by the USPS). Shipping addresses to foreign destinations should only be written in English or Romanized lettering. The customer is responsible for paying any import tariffs or customs duties that may be due on delivery to foreign destinations.

Mailing boxes, tubes and envelopes, as well as packing slips and receipts, will identify California's Gold (a deliberate alias to maintain confidentiality) as the sender and will have no revealing logos or mission statements to indicate the nature of what is inside. Customs declaration forms for international shipments will show the true retail value along with accurate but non-revealing descriptions like “spouts”, “retainers” or "measurement probes" that may include the HS tariff number, which will be meaningless to most people and innocuous even to customs inspectors. None of TP's product descriptions, neither on packing slips, nor on customs forms, will ever provide any hint of their intended uses.

Domestic Orders

Domestic orders in the USA, including its territories and possessions, are shipped by the USPS's Priority Mail™ service: the least expensive service that allows tracking, which TP considers essential for both the customer and its own sake. Priority Mail promises delivery within 2-3 days and, in addition to normal residential and commercial addresses, includes delivery to mailboxes, mail slots, and PO Boxes™ (if physically possible). No signature is required upon receipt, but Priority Mail does provide confirmation of delivery to TP (to thwart scam artists who might claim not to have received the shipment). TP will replace any domestic order that is lost in transit.

The USPS’s Priority Mail postage rates aren't sensitive to size or weight for the small packages that TP typically ships. In keeping with the USPS’s minimum flat rate fees for Priority Mail, a standard flat rate shipping & handling (S&H) charge of $10.00 is therefore applied to all domestic orders. Regardless of whether you buy just one small item or your order includes almost one of everything in Tether Products’ entire product line, your total shipping & handling cost in the USA and its possessions will be just a flat $10.00 per order. This is great if you are ordering a lot of items, but it may not seem like such a bargain if you are ordering just one or two items that would fit in a letter size envelope. It is unfortunately unavoidable if the ability to track the package is to be maintained. To get the most value, customers are encouraged to think ahead, and save by ordering carefully with anticipation and forethought of future needs to avoid unnecessary shipments.

International Orders

International orders to foreign destinations, including Canada and Mexico, are shipped by the USPS's First-Class Package International™ service, which ironically is often no slower than some of the USPS's more expensive services. The USPS provides a tracking number, which will be valid while the package is in the USPS’s possession, but tracking to the final destination is not guaranteed and will depend on the postal system of the receiving country. Estimated time of delivery and whether or not delivery can be made to mailboxes, mail slots, and PO Boxes is also indeterminate and will depend on the quality of postal service in the destination country. TP expects most deliveries to occur within 2-3 weeks (often much sooner) and no signature is required upon receipt, however in some countries packages may be held up by Customs for as long as 30 days or more pending assessment of import duties or tariffs.


Caveat emptor (buyer beware): Tether Products will replace any order that is lost while in the possession of the USPS, but will not guarantee delivery of foreign orders after they leave the USPS's hands.


Until early 2018 Tether Products was able to ship most international orders as First Class Mail International in large envelopes for just a few dollars. The savings were passed on to customers in the form of refunds. This loophole has however now been closed by the USPS and only "documents" may now be shipped by First Class Mail International service. Postal rates now depend on content and everything that cannot be classified as a "document", regardless of size or weight, must now be shipped by First Class Package International service at considerably greater cost. Concurrent with this new policy, the USPS’s postal rates have also changed significantly. Illogical as it may seem, as a "Package" rather than as "Mail" it now costs the same to mail a feather-light 2 oz. flat envelope as it does to mail a half-pound cardboard box. The 2-step process of refunding excess shipping & handling charges has therefore regrettably been eliminated and all international orders are now charged a flat rate $20.00 shipping & handling fee similar to that of domestic orders.

Returns

Please note that, due to the very intimate and personal nature of its products and the potential for those products (if they were ever shared) to harbor and spread disease, Tether Products cannot accept returns and all sales, once they leave TP’s premises, are final. Please see Customer Service & Customer Feedback for further information.