Delivering IT Hardware to Military Installations

Most commercial deliveries succeed because the carrier can simply drive up and hand off the freight. A military installation — like many secured, limited-access, or appointment-only sites — removes that assumption. The delivery vehicle may need a scheduled appointment to reach the receiving point. The driver may need to be escorted past the gate, or hold a credential to enter at all. The installation may require a certificate of insurance before it will admit a freight carrier. And once inside, a heavy or palletized shipment may need a liftgate to reach the ground and an inside-delivery arrangement to reach the room where it will be used.

Each of those is a real, quotable service, and each one is a place a shipment can stall if it was not arranged in advance. The single most useful thing a buyer can do is surface these requirements before the order is accepted — while they can still be priced into the shipment — rather than discovering them when a truck is turned away at the gate.

Our Shipping and Delivery Policy asks buyers to disclose, before acceptance, any appointment, limited-access, military-base, clearance, escort, certificate-of-insurance, liftgate, inside-delivery, stairs, equipment, union, or similar requirement that applies to the destination. That list is not bureaucratic throat-clearing — it is the exact set of conditions that determine whether a carrier can complete the delivery and what it costs to do so.

The reason to disclose early is financial as well as practical. When re-delivery, storage, detention, demurrage, address-correction, refusal, or accessorial charges arise because a requirement was not disclosed up front, those charges are the buyer's responsibility. A liftgate quoted into the order is a line item; a liftgate discovered when the truck arrives is a re-delivery. Getting the access profile of the destination onto the order before acceptance is how you keep those costs from landing on the invoice after the fact.

Freight delivery reaches the curb or the dock — and, unless the accepted order states otherwise, it stops there. It does not include unpacking, placement, assembly, installation, or debris removal. For a pallet of switches or a rack of servers bound for a specific room inside a controlled building, the gap between the dock and the destination is real work, and it is worth deciding in advance who performs it.

If you need the shipment moved past the dock — into a building, up a floor, unpacked and positioned, with packaging hauled away — that is inside delivery, white-glove, or installation service, and it has to be part of the accepted order to happen. Naming it up front turns a curbside drop into a to-the-room delivery; leaving it unstated means the freight ends at the dock and the rest becomes your team's problem on receiving day.

Shipments go to commercial, residential, government, and educational addresses in the United States, including APO/FPO and carrier-hold locations, subject to manufacturer, carrier, hazmat, high-value, and subscription restrictions. Deliveries to Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. territories, APO/FPO, and remote destinations may involve additional cost, time, or documentation, and they are confirmed before they ship.

Two addressing rules matter most for base-bound freight. First, freight, hazardous, oversized, high-value, or signature-required shipments cannot be delivered to a P.O. box — they need a physical receiving address. Second, a verified address may be required before such a shipment moves. Confirming the exact, deliverable ship-to address early avoids an address correction later, which is both a delay and a chargeable event.

A common assumption is that any large order automatically ships free. The free standard ground offer applies to eligible orders over $2,500 to a single address in the contiguous United States — but it excludes special-handling shipments and the very services a base delivery most often needs: inside delivery, liftgate, appointment, white-glove, installation, and expedited service, along with freight, oversized, and hazardous shipments and APO/FPO and remote destinations.

In other words, the access requirements that make a base delivery a base delivery are the same ones that tend to move it outside the free-ground offer. Rather than assume either way, let checkout or the quote disclose whether a specific order qualifies — that is where the eligibility of your exact shipment, to your exact destination, is actually determined.

High-value shipments may require an adult signature, a photo ID, an appointment, or secure receiving before a carrier will release them — and the buyer is responsible for ensuring an authorized person is present to receive the shipment. On an installation with a central receiving point or a controlled dock, that means confirming who is authorized to sign, that they will be available in the delivery window, and that any secure-receiving process the site runs is accounted for.

The carrier is selected by the seller unless the accepted order says otherwise, and tracking is provided when the carrier generates it. If your program supplies its own carrier account, responsibility for that carrier — and the risk of loss once the product is tendered to it — moves with it.

In-stock standard items generally leave the warehouse within one to three business days — an estimate, not a guarantee — while build-to-order, configured, allocated, and licensed items take longer. Delivery estimates themselves come from manufacturers, distributors, integration, and carriers, and shared inventory is not reserved until an order is accepted.

For a base delivery, the site-access steps sit on top of that timeline: an appointment has to be scheduled, a certificate of insurance has to be on file, an escort has to be arranged. Backorder, allocation, weather, congestion, or a manufacturer change can move a date, and when a material delay happens you will get options — wait, take a partial shipment, choose an alternative, or cancel the unshipped portion. Building runway in front of the destination's access requirements is what keeps a normal lead time from becoming a missed delivery window.

Inspect every delivery before signing. Record any visible damage or shortage on the carrier's document at the point of delivery, keep the product and all of its packaging, and photograph the condition — preserving that evidence is what makes carrier recovery possible. Report a damage or shortage problem to [email protected] within five business days of delivery.

If a shipment never arrives, report it within ten days after the expected delivery date. On a controlled site where a delivery may sit at a central receiving point before it reaches your team, tracking the shipment to actual receipt — not just to the gate — is worth the attention.

Once an order is accepted, changing the ship-to address requires approval and can trigger re-screening, a tax recalculation, a delay, or fees, and carriers may refuse to reroute a high-value shipment in transit. Costs that arise from a bad address, an unavailable recipient, a refused shipment, or an unauthorized reroute are the buyer's responsibility unless the cause was a seller error.

The practical implication for base deliveries is to get the destination right the first time. A gate that turns a truck away, a receiving point that changed, or a credential that was not ready can each end in a refusal or a reroute — and those are exactly the events the policy makes chargeable. The disclose-up-front discipline in this guide is what prevents them.