What comes with your order
Every lot goes through mass spectrometry before release. The certificate of analysis states the sequence as synthesised, the measured mass against the calculated mass, the purification method, the yield and the release date. It is issued with the shipment, not held until someone asks for it.
Three purification grades. Desalted is the default for unmodified primers and is fine for PCR, sequencing and most cloning. HPLC is used for probes, labelled oligos and RNA, where a failure sequence carrying a dye is worse than a lower yield. PAGE is for long oligos and for work where full-length purity matters more than how much you get back; expect to lose material to it.
The grade you ordered is printed on the COA. If we cannot deliver it we tell you before shipping rather than quietly substituting something else.
If a lot misses its stated specification we remake it and ship the replacement free of charge — you do not pay again and you do not return the original. You do not have to send us gel images or argue the case first. If you would rather have the money back than the remake, say so and we refund it.
Getting it to you
Oligos travel lyophilised at ambient temperature. They are stable dry, which is the reason this product can sensibly be shipped across the world at all: no dry ice, no temperature logger, and no parcel sitting in a customs queue losing its cold chain.
Where it ships from. Orders to Asia-Pacific destinations are dispatched from our Hong Kong hub. Hong Kong is a free port: there is no import duty on the parcel while it is with us, and the onward leg to most of the region is a short-haul flight rather than a trans-Pacific one. Everywhere else goes out by international courier from the point of manufacture. We have not opened a second hub yet and we are not going to imply one.
We do not print a transit time: we have not shipped enough parcels to know the real distribution, and customs clearance varies more by destination than the flight does. You get the air waybill when the parcel leaves, and the carrier’s own tracking from there. Remote and inland addresses take longer and we will say so when we confirm rather than after you have paid.
Duties and import taxes are set by your customs authority, not by us. Where we collect them we remit them in full; they are not a margin line. Institutions in the EU and the UK with a VAT number should enter it on the order, and VAT is handled by reverse charge.
Country of origin is declared on the commercial invoice for each lot, according to where it was manufactured. Dispatching from Hong Kong does not change it, and being an American brand does not make the goods American-made. If your institution needs the origin confirmed before it raises a purchase order, ask and we will put it in writing for the specific lot.
How you pay
Every order is paid before it is dispatched. We do not run credit accounts and we do not offer payment terms — not to anybody, not on the first order and not on the tenth. A supplier who extends credit has to price the risk of not being paid, and that price ends up on the invoice of everyone who does pay. We would rather not carry it.
The sequence is: you place the order, we confirm what we can make and what it costs, and you get a proforma invoice with the bank details on it. Pay against that invoice by transfer and the order goes into synthesis. Nothing about the process needs a phone call.
Sold and invoiced by our Hong Kong entity; payment is made to a Hong Kong bank account. Invoices are issued in USD and settled by transfer to a Hong Kong bank account. We put that here rather than on the invoice, because finding out where your money is going at the moment you are asked to send it is a bad way to find out. The brand is American; the company selling to you is in Hong Kong. Both of those are on the terms page.
If your institution buys through a purchase order, put the PO number on the order and it is printed on both the proforma and the final invoice, so your procurement office can match them. The PO gets your paperwork through — it does not change when payment is due.
Need a formal quotation first? Build the order, choose "Get a quotation" instead of checkout, and you get a numbered quotation valid for 30 days that you can print or save as a PDF. Order against that number later and the prices on it are the prices you pay, even if the list has moved.
What happens to your sequences
They are used to make your order. That is the whole list. They do not go into a catalogue, they are not mined to design products, and they are not passed to anyone beyond the people who have to synthesise and ship the tube.
You can delete a sequence from your account whenever you like. Deleting it removes it from your order history. What survives is the minimum an accountant and a QC traceability record require for a lot we have already shipped, which we are not free to erase.
We do not ask for an NDA before you order. If your institution needs one, send it to support@oligodirect.com and we will sign it.
When it arrives
Dry oligos survive a week on a bench without complaining. For anything longer, keep them dry at −20 °C.
Resuspend in TE (10 mM Tris, 0.1 to 1 mM EDTA, pH 8.0) rather than water. Water is usually slightly acidic once it has sat around, and a slightly acidic solution depurinates DNA slowly enough that you will blame something else. The tube and the certificate of analysis both carry the yield in OD and nmol, and the certificate carries the sequence-specific extinction coefficient it was converted with, so you can work out a resuspension volume without trusting a generic 33 µg/OD rule.
RNA and probes: nuclease-free buffer, aliquot before you freeze, and do not put a fluorescent probe back on the bench in the light. Freeze-thaw cycles cost you more signal than most people expect.
Where your order is
Every order gets a reference of the form OD-XXXXXXXX on the confirmation screen. Put that and the email address you ordered with into the order tracker and you get the current stage, the date we set it, and each line of the order.
The tracker shows what we have actually recorded, and nothing else. If a stage has not been reached there is no predicted date next to it, because a predicted date is a guess dressed up as information. When a shipment leaves we put the courier and the air waybill number on the same page so you can follow it on the courier's own tracking.
No account and no password. The reference plus the ordering email is the key, which means you can send both to whoever signs for parcels in your building without giving them access to anything else.
Design support
Free, and not conditional on an order. If the design we send back does not convince you, do not buy it.
Send a gene symbol and a species, or a construct and an application. What comes back is a proposed design with the reasoning attached: why that region, why that Tm, why that modification and not the cheaper one. Priced against the published list so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
When you need a person
support@oligodirect.com. One address, read by the people who actually run the orders — not a ticketing queue and not a bot. You get an answer within one business day. If the question needs a synthesis chemist it can take a day longer, and we will tell you that rather than guess at it.
Quote your order or quotation reference if you have one; it is the difference between an answer and a round of questions. For anything about a shipped lot, the COA number gets us to the right record straight away.
Much of what people write in about is already on this site and faster to read than to ask: the price for any order appears as you configure it, what comes with a shipment is above, and so is where your parcel leaves from. Write in when the question is about your experiment, when something has gone wrong with an order, or when your purchasing office needs a document we have not thought to publish.
There is no phone number yet. A number nobody picks up is worse than no number at all, so we are not printing one until somebody is there to answer it.