Josh’s Frogs – A Green Business

Josh’s Frogs is committed to Green Practices across our business. As a business, we want to leave the smallest footprint we possibly can. We believe it is our responsibility as stewards of our planet to do so.

Josh’s Frogs reuses as many boxes as possible. We collect boxes at the local schools and area businesses. We use as many of them as are safe to use for shipping. This cuts down on waste in our community.

We use recycled newspaper as packing material in all of our shipments. Packing peanuts fill our landfills and take generations to decompose.

Our frogroom is kept below ground in order to minimize heating and cooling. While we have an Air Conditioner in our frogroom for the safety of our frogs, it has not kicked on for 2 years.

We use efficient lighting such as T-8s, T-5s, and compact fluorescents.

We collect Styrofoam shippers from the veterinarian clinics in our community and reuse them in shipping frogs and feeder insects. We’d love for this to replace our own Styrofoam shippers and are working on ways to work with other businesses that use these coolers for shipments in order to recycle and reuse as many of them as possible.

We’d love to hear back from you on ideas to leave an even smaller footprint. What are you doing in your frog keeping to reduce your footprint?

UPS vs. USPS shipping

We have tried a variety of shipping carriers over the years. We don’t use FedEx because of their animal shipping policies (you are not allowed to send animals to a residence with FedEx even if you go through the hoops of getting certified to ship animals). They also have later guaranteed times on their next day shipments than UPS. DHL prices are competitive, but their service area is still growing. We currently use two carriers. They are the United States Post Office and the United Parcel Service. This table outlines some of the differences so that people are aware of what they are getting when they choose to have their order shipped with that carrier.

	United States Post Office	United Parcel Service
Package Tracking	Real-time tracking and guaranteed delivery date are only available for Express (next day) service. USPS offers delivery confirmation on Priority packages. This option does not provide real-time updates, but merely lets the tracker know the information was sent to USPS. For priority mail, the 2-3 days is an estimate. If it takes a week to get there, USPS will not refund the shipping costs.	Real-Time Tracking available on all package types and every package has a guaranteed arrival date. These guaranteed arrival dates are guaranteed unless there is inclement weather.
Loss or Damaged Packages	USPS does not insure packages against being lost or damaged. For more information, see USPS terms for uninsured packages	All UPS packages are automatically insured. For more information, see UPS Claims information
Delivery Dates	USPS accepts and delivers packages Monday-Saturday except for these USPS Holidays	UPS accepts and delivers packages Monday-Friday except for these UPS Holidays

How secure is JoshsFrogs.com?

I just had a customer question whether my site was secure or not because they didn’t have the padlock icon on the bottom of their browser, so I thought with holiday season coming, I would write up a little bit about security and how you know a page you are looking at is secure.

JoshsFrogs.com uses the highest security available on the web today. The sad part is that not all sites go to the lengths that we have here to make sure your information stays secure.

First off, the lock icon has moved on your browser (if you are using firefox or IE 7). Security info is now next to the address bar at the top of the screen and the lock is bigger now. You can also right click on the page to get security info by clicking on “View Page Info” in Firefox and “Properties” in IE 7.

Secondly, secure pages begin with https: instead of http:. If you are being asked to login, enter in your address or credit card info, make sure the page begins with https:.

Thirdly, I highly recommend opening up a browser and typing in an address instead of relying on a link in an email. Because they could be doing this:

paypal.com

If you are on a page asking you to login or give your payment info and you don’t see the padlock and the page begins with http: instead of https:, then it is best to move on.