We pride ourselves that very nearly all of our orders arrive in perfect condition, packaged by hand to ensure it survives no matter the weather or handling.

Since your order is 'constructed' by hand on demand, we advise that there might be a one-business-day gap between us receiving your order and then dispatching it (potentially longer for very large orders). This means that if you send us an order at Friday 15:00 (UTC), it might not be dispatched until Tuesday afternoon! Usually, though, we're pretty quick and efficient, so just bear the above in mind as a precaution. We'll always let you know personally if there's any significant delay.

Based on our experience and the guarantees of our shipping services, here's a rough guide for how long delivery will take from dispatch. Please note that shipping might be delayed during peak times (see below).

Once your order is out of our hands, the order status will switch from Awaiting dispatch to Dispatched, and we'll send you an email with any tracking information. At this point we do really mean that it's out of our hands—literally!—so, while we apologise sincerely for any delays, we unfortunately can't speed things up after this point.

If your order was tracked and arrived late (or not at all), please do let us know. Where possible, we'll chase up the shipping company.

Please note that all of our shipping boxes are too large to fit through a standard letter box. If you ordered a signed-for service but weren't at home when the postman came to visit, Royal Mail will leave an information card with instructions how to book a redelivery or collect the package yourself at a post office/depot. If you know you won't be at home during daytime hours, we recommend using your work address or a trusted neighbour's for delivery.

Royal Mail's Special Delivery service is guaranteed to deliver before 13:00 on the day after dispatch. If it doesn't, please let us know!

Deliveries to the USA require a prior notice as per FDA regulations. Normally, this isn't an issue at all, but on very rare occasions a package might get held and searched. The number of times this has happened to us can be counted on one hand—so it really is rare—but please do contact us if something looks amiss.

Occasionally, for especially large orders, we might contact you to discuss alternative packing arrangements. There's a few tricks we can do to prevent shipping costs from becoming extortionate, but we like to ensure you're happy with the alternatives.

Certain parts of the year see a high volume of postage being sent—Christmas and the new year especially. Around these times, Royal Mail's shipping times may be delayed by a few days (courier services tend to be consistent).

Unfortunately, this is out of our control. However, Royal Mail do advertise 'deadlines' for Christmas in particular—the last date on which they guarantee delivery before Christmas—and we do our best to advertise them to you via our homepage and email newsletter. So, near the end of the year, please do get your orders to us as soon as possible! If you've got a last-minute order to make around this time, please order delivery by courier to ensure speedy delivery.

During the northern hemisphere's summer, the temperature both in Britain and elsewhere can become so hot that most of our chocolates won't survive transit! Fulfilling orders around this time is done on a case-by-case basis: milk chocolates to California definitely won't survive the week's trip at 30ºC / 85ºF, but one-day transits within Britain are often very possible.

If you want chocolates delivered outside the UK and Ireland during the summer, we strongly recommend choosing a courier service. Thanks to their quicker delivery times and more lenient size/weight limits, we've found success delivering internationally by including ice packs.

If we have any concerns about fulfilling your order safely, we'll let you know via email and discuss your choices (including a full refund if nothing works). We advertise this each year in our newsletter if you want to be notified when we 'shut down' and 'open up' again.

We are confident that you will enjoy your chocolates! However, if something has unfortunately gone wrong, we operate a 100% satisfaction guarantee: just email us at returns@chocobong.com to let us know of the issue, and whether you'd prefer new chocolates to be dispatched or a refund. If the chocolates are damaged on arrival, please also let us know which ones are broken and the extent of the damage (pictures are helpful!), since we'd obviously like to avoid making the same mistake twice!

Normally, we don't ask you to return chocolates that aren't up to standard. However, in the extremely unlikely case of a quality/health issue with the chocolates themselves, we might ask you to send some samples back so we can inform the manufacturers. We'll arrange with you the most suitable method for return shipping, and refund you appropriately.