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.
Purification. Desalted is the default for unmodified primers and is fine for PCR, sequencing and most cloning; it suits oligos up to about 35 nt, and above that full-length purity is not guaranteed, so PAGE or HPLC is the safer choice. Fast PAGE suits oligos up to about 40 nt. HPLC is used for probes, labelled oligos and RNA, where a failure sequence carrying a dye is worse than a lower yield. PAGE and UltraPAGE are for long oligos and for work where full-length purity matters more than how much you get back; expect to lose material to them. The purity specifications are desalted ≥80% (oligos up to 40 nt), PAGE ≥85% and HPLC ≥90%. Those are specifications, not a measurement of your tube — order the UPLC/CE purity report if you need the number for your lot.
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.
What shipping costs. The order builder and your basket show it live, before you order: $135 an order by international courier, and free once your order is large enough — the basket tells you exactly how much more that takes. To Australia and New Zealand the shipping charge is all-in: customs clearance, import duty and GST are included, and nothing more is collected from you on delivery.
How long it takes. Australia and New Zealand, where we are starting: one to two weeks from order to delivery, including synthesis, QC, the flight and customs clearance. If a line on your order will take longer — a long or heavily modified oligo, a large scale, anything priced by hand — we tell you before the order goes ahead. You get the air waybill when the parcel leaves, and the carrier’s own tracking from there. Other destinations: we confirm the lead time with the order.
Duties and taxes. To Australia and New Zealand we ship duty and tax paid: any import duty and GST are in the shipping charge, or on us when shipping is free, and nothing is collected from you on delivery. Enter your institution’s ABN or GST number on the order so it appears on the invoice. To other destinations, import duty and VAT or GST are set by your customs authority and paid on delivery; enter your VAT or tax number so it appears on the invoice. In the UK, a VAT-registered buyer who gives its VAT number accounts for VAT under the reverse charge on consignments of £135 or less.
Importing nucleic acid. Some countries regulate synthetic DNA and RNA at the border. In Australia, synthetic sequences homologous to microorganisms or infectious agents need a biosecurity import permit from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry before the parcel arrives; sequences homologous to multicellular organisms, other than prions or parasites, do not. If your order needs a permit, tell us the permit number and we put it on the commercial invoice, or ask us for the declaration your permit application needs.
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 SINO GENOMICS TECHNOLOGY LIMITED, Hong Kong. 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.
Ask us at support@oligodirect.com and we delete your sequences from your order records. 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 certificate of analysis carries the yield in OD and nmol and 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. That coefficient is the sum of the four base coefficients; a nearest-neighbour calculator gives a DNA value about 10–15% lower, so its nmol figure comes out correspondingly higher.
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.