Buying online, especially from a website you may never have encountered before, can often feel risky. The intention of this page is to provide our current, and future, customers with some peace of mind when purchasing from our store.

Is our site safe?

We host our site on Nexcess, an established WordPress/WooCommerce host, and follow best-practices for maintaining site security. This includes regular security scans and audits.

Credit Card transactions are handled by Authorize.net, a Visa solution. We do not store any credit card data, it is all handled by Authorize.net. You can click the below image to confirm that the site you are visiting is the same site that Authorize.net is configured for:

Cryptocurrency transactions are handled by Coinbase Commerce, an established player in the Cryptocurrency space.

We also offer the ability to pay using Sezzle, allowing you to pay over time with 0% interest.

No matter how you pay, we don’t have access to any of your payment information (it’s stored directly with the processor).

We partner with Eye4Fraud for detecting fraudulent transactions. Fraud is unfortunately rampant online, particularly when it comes to the firearms industry. Eye4Fraud helps ensure that our site is not used by fraudsters to process transactions, which may not necessarily impact our customers, but helps ensure we can continue to process transactions and not go out of business due to excessive fraudulent transactions.

Are we legit?

There are a few different places you can read reviews from our customers:

What about the inventory?

All our inventory is source from large, established, US-based distributors or directly from the manufacturer. This helps ensure that all the products we are selling are not counterfeit, and covered by all applicable warranties.

For products that we drop-ship, we use suppliers that we have purchased from for at least 6 months before adding them to our list of drop-shipping sources. This helps ensure that we can confirm their average processing times, items are packed appropriately, and have clear processes for returns or addressing issues.

Metrics

Our aim is to update this information at least every 3 months. As our back-end systems are upgraded and we are able to gather more data, in real-time, we will move to a more regular cadence of refreshing the data within this section. Our intention is to provide quantitative data over time.

The below information is current as of 10th August 2021.

Payments

Fraudulent Transactions

Fraudulent transactions average less than 5% of all transactions we process.
Less than .5% of these transactions were processed.
- Our target is 0%. To address this, we are working with our Fraud Detection partner to further fine tune how they detect and validate potentially fraudulent transactions.
In the last 3 months we identified no transactions incorrectly categorized as fraudulent.

Credit Card Chargebacks

Less than 1% of all Credit Card transactions triggered a chargeback. Our target is 0%.
- The most common reason was a valid order showing up under our old business name, Itervention, which caused confusion as to the source of the transaction. To resolve this we have worked with our credit card processor to ensure that all transactions show up as Saint Barb’s Bullets.
The second most common reason was due to a fraudulent transaction not being prevented.
We received no chargebacks due to a disagreement over the product delivered.

Orders

Time to Validate

We currently do not have data on the time to validate orders that require ID verification, such as ammunition or magazine shipments to restricted states.
Today, orders that require verification are held until they can be manually verified by a team member. This back and forth over email is generally completed within 1-2 business days, however it can take longer. To improve this process we are planning on implementing the following:
- Short term, we are looking for secure options to store information (such as FOID’s for our customers in Illinois), so that once we validate information for a customer it can be reused until it expires.
- Longer term, we’re looking at integrating this validation process into the checkout workflow, to capture information as the transaction is processed, particularly for customers in California

Time to Ship

Orders are generally shipped within the same, or next, business day.
When we miss this target it has been due to a couple of different factors:
- UPS in our area has occasionally missed pickups, or picked up earlier than requested. We are working with a new account manager to drive more consistency in our pickup schedule, and have begun shipping some orders through FedEx so we have alternatives available to us.
- Large volumes of orders occasionally overwhelm us. We’ve invested in new packing and shipping equipment, and looking to grow our team with more casual staff, to handle these surges in order volume.
- This also applies to our drop-shipping suppliers. When items may take longer to ship we make sure to note it on the product page.

Cancellations

The most common reason for cancellations was due to stock being unavailable.
- This was primarily due to drop-shipped products being out of stock when an order was processed. We are addressing this in several different ways:
  1. We have reduced the time that it takes for stock counts at our suppliers to be reflected on our website, and for orders on our site to make it to the supplier.
  2. We have increased the threshold at which we will show a product as out of stock
  3. We have added in monitoring to detect if a product count is out of sync between our site and our suppliers inventory.
  4. Increasing the amount of stock we maintain in our own warehouse, for drop-shipped items.
The second most common reason was due to pricing errors.
- This was due to some… quirks… with how our inventory system integrates with our order routing system, which could cause some items to be listed for $1. To prevent this, we have added in rules to prevent items below a certain price being made available for sale, and now have a better understanding of how these two systems integrate.
The third most common reason was due to customers being unaware of, or unable to provide, legally required information to ship ammunition, or other restricted items, to their location.
- As mentioned in other places, we’re
A small number of issues were caused by our warehouse inventory system showing incorrect stock levels
- This was mainly due to lack of familiarity with how returns or refunds impact inventory levels, which we have corrected through further training and familiarization with our inventory management system.
- We also identified and resolved a bug where orders may not have been routed correctly to our own warehouse stock, and as a result the stock levels were not correctly reduced.
A very small number of orders were cancelled as we are currently unable to ship ammunition to Alaska
- We’re currently talking to a number of Alaskan shipping companies in Washington State to enable cost-effective shipping to Alaska

Returns

We had no returns due to damaged items in the previous 3 months.
Less than 1% of orders were returned due to incorrect items shipped in the order. Our target is 0%.
- Over the past 3 months we have seen this issue improve significantly due to improvements in order processing workflows, and encouraging the team to take breaks or swap tasks when getting fatigued from the repetitive tasks associated with processing orders.
- Short term, we’re continuing to work to improve our error picking and validation processes, and improve the layout of our warehouse.
- Long term, we’re planning to transition to a barcode-based inventory system, so that when picking an order our team will scan the product barcode, rather than relying on matching product names/SKU’s, to further reduce errors.
A very small number of orders were returned due to an incorrect item purchased.

Trust and Safety