All Your St. Croix Virgin Islands Shipping and Delivery Questions, Answered
How does the mail work? Can you order stuff from Amazon? Should I ship my car from the states? What about household furnishings? We hear these questions from real estate clients all the time, and it all boils down to one simple fact: When you live on an island of just 84 square miles in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, virtually everything needs to be shipped in somehow, from household goods to home furnishings to vehicles. You can and should shop local — we have a lot of great stores and shopping advice, which we’ll save for another blog post — but for the things you can’t or choose not to purchase on-island, how can you get them here?
USPS delivers to St. Croix
As a U.S. territory, the Virgin Islands are served by the U.S. Postal Service, but most of the island does not have home delivery like you’ll find stateside — only the condo complexes and a few select communities have this service. Therefore, the easiest way to receive mail is to rent a post office box at one of the six post office locations from west to east.
Most neighborhoods are served by banks of roadside mailboxes along the main streets, but there are more homes than boxes available. As a resident, you can take a copy of your deed or lease into the main post office — Richmond for anywhere in Christiansted and Mars Hill for Frederiksted — and ask if one can be assigned to you, and you may luck out. Just be aware that for any packages that won’t fit in the box, a pickup slip will be left and a trip to the post office will be in your near future. Also, USPS has fairly strict package size limits: 130 inches in combined length and girth and a maximum weight of 70 pounds, so anything larger than that cannot be shipped by Uncle Sam.
To that end, Fed Ex, UPS, and DHL also ship items here, with larger package sizes permitted, but these shippers treat the U.S. Virgin Islands as an international location from the mainland U.S. — after all, there are no ground routes — meaning the rates are much higher.
Amazon ships to St. Croix — with caveats
Amazon will ship to St. Croix, but your stateside Prime membership benefit of free shipping is moot. (And don’t let people tell you they just argue with a customer service agent and get refunded — those days are long gone.) Most items now carry a minimum $10 shipping charge — for even the smallest thing — and shipping rates used to diminish as you added items to the cart, but lately they’ve been compounding. Items that will ship at all are also limited in size and weight by USPS regulations. Not only that, Amazon often uses a service called “USPS Ground Advantage” for shipping, and as there is no actual ground route to get to St. Croix from the states, packages sit in Jacksonville awaiting the ship to fill before going to Puerto Rico then finally here — a process that can take up to a few weeks.
The one Amazon service that’s still a relative bargain: Subscribe & Save, which allows you to schedule household staples and shelf-stable food items to be automatically shipped and comes with free shipping as long as you have the required minimum of five items per shipment. Be aware that most of the time Amazon ships these items “Priority Mail,” which arrive in a week or so, but that’s not always the case; if your package goes Ground Advantage, it may arrive a lot later than planned. You also have to keep up with your deliveries, adjusting what you need each month before the shipping date, or you may end up buying stuff you don’t really need. And price-compare: Sometimes Amazon is wayyyyy more expensive than you’d pay for the same thing on-island.
As for the other box stores: Walmart used to be a great deal for the items that would ship here, but the company added a hefty location-based surcharge last fall, making any savings moot. Target also ships to St. Croix, but not all items, and with a shipping surcharge unless you join its Target Circle 360 program for a fee.
Freight forwarders ship anything to St. Croix (but It’s not cheap)
Whether you want to ship your car, household belongings, items that are larger than the package size restrictions of the U.S. Postal Service, or anything at all from a stateside retailer that does not ship to the U.S. Virgin Islands, you’ll be using a freight forwarder. Companies like Paradise Freight, VI Cargo, and Crowley are set up to receive your items at their warehouses in Florida to be loaded onto cargo ships that make once-weekly trips to (and from) St. Croix.
For larger items like cars and pallets of household goods, you should call to get a quote for ground transport overland in the states to Florida, then shipment to St. Croix. (With a vehicle, you’ll save money if you drive it to the dock yourself.) Everything coming in must clear customs, and vehicles are subject to taxes if they are not U.S. assembled.
For smaller items or ones coming from stateside retailers that only ship to addresses in the contiguous U.S., you order your item online with your name and the Florida address of the freight forwarder as your ship-to. Then you forward your receipt or invoice for the purchase via email, so they know what to expect. It can take a week or more for your item to make it on a ship, and they’ll call you once it has cleared customs and is ready for pickup in St. Croix. To get an estimate of the cost to freight-forward an item in advance, all of these companies allow you to request a quote via their websites.
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