Here is what I can tell folks. We are in very unusual times. The virus has affected a lot of things. One of the biggest changes is the speed of deliveries. With so many shopping at home, with the delivery of vaccines and then with the effect of holiday shopping and returns, shipping speed has been slowed.
One thing to bear in mind is that fish shippers will not insure them against lost in transit for any reason. What this means is that if a driver with your box of fish takes it out of the truck and sets in on the ground so they can take out another package they need to deliver and when the drive returns forgets about your box and backs over it, too bad. Live fish are not insurable nor guaranteed to arrive alive.
While I now longer ship for the most part, when I did I offered the best guarantee inn the business and one which nobody else does (to the best of my knowledge). I not only guaranteed your fish would arrive alive and healthy, but I also gave a satisfaction guarantee. If you were not satisfied with the fish you received for any reason what-so-ever, you could ship them back to me. As long as they came back in good condition I would refund 100% of your purchase prices including shipping and I would also pay for the cost to send them back. Nobody ever sent back fish. I did have an infrewuent DOA and I always offered the buy the option of a replacement or a refund, their choice.
One reason I did this was to eliminate the hours of work it took to catch and then to photograph the exact fish you would receive. Additionally, I had to segregate these fish until I received payment and could ship them out. Because the least expensive fish I sold ran at about $50 each and many were in the multiple $100 range, I was not sending out tons of boxes.
