Saltwaterfish.com

As some of you may know i placed an order with swf.com early last week.  I really should have waited till this spring when the weather is better but we could afford the fish i wanted now so i decided to go ahead and order.  I ordered 9 lyretail anthias, i was really excited about getting another school of fish in my tank being the chromis i have now aren't really a school anymore because of deaths over the last year or so.  So anyway, i ordered on sunday night the order was prosessed and we shipped on tues with a wed. delivery date.  Apparently they got delayed in IN. due to the weather adn were going to be a day late.  I was a little concerned but figured everything would be ok, what one more night?  Well i got home from work on thursday and still no package, now i was really concerned, i checked with fed-ex and the informed me my package was at the local station and was scheduled to be delived on Friday.  That would have been 3 nights in the cold, i am certain all of the fish would have been dead by then so i decided to go pick them up and see if i could save them.  When i got home i was suprised only 1 was DOA but the others looked very stressed.  At this point i was really wishing i had a quaranteen tank setup.  Being i didn't i decided to take the chance, i acclimated them for about 3 hours and decided to release them in my display.  The next morning i found 4 that were alive and the rest were MIA.  So as of now i am out 5, $20 fish, SWF.com apparently doesn;t have a phone number for customer support, they require you to email about any DOA's or losses.  After further reading i come to find that they require you to mail back the bodies of the dead which i find very revolting, who wants to handle dead fish and ship them>?!??  I have been told by a couple other members that i can possibly get in store credit w/o sending back the dead ones, which i would really like to do being i was only able to find 1 body and have the 1 doa, also, i don;t really want to send anything dead in the mail, it just seems kind of wrong.  I understand SWF would like proof of deaths but like i said, i just think its disturbing.  I have emailed SWF on thursday about my losses but the only message i got back was automated telling me to send in the corpses if i want my money back.  At this point i wish i would have just let them all die and get my money back and order from Live Aquaria.  They have excellent customer support and are prompt to credit you for DOA's.  I am hoping SWF will make this right by atleast giving me credit for the ones that didn't make it.  Hopefully i will recieve an email from an actual person tomorrow and they will straighten it out, if not i will never order form them again and discourage others to as well.  Bottom line is i ordered from them because they were a couple dollars cheaper per fish, now after going through all this hassle i would have gladly paid $10 more a fish and got the proper customer service like LA.com has.
I'll keep you posted as to what comes out of this, as of now i feel like i'm out $100.

 

I hear ya Clayton, i have been preaching the same thing for the last few years about ordering during the winter months. The only reason i did it was because we had the extra money and none of the LFS ever had a good size group of anthias like i wanted.

I got an automated email from SWF.com today all it was was we are sorry abour this bla bla bla here is a link to our return policy. I really can't believe they make you send back dead fish. I think its just absurd. I am sure they are doing it just to cover their own butt, but if i was trying to screw them over, wouldn't i just have let them sit at the fed-ex station one more night just so they would have all been dead, or said they all died? As of now i have 4 anthias in my tank and 3 bodies, there are still 2 bodies in my tank somewhere that i will more than likely never find so i guess i am just out those fish.

Bottom line is SWF's customer service sucks, by asking you to return dead fish to get a refund or credit for just means that they don't trust their customers, so the question is, why should we trust them?

 

Thanks Sean, thats one thing i can't stand is automated messages instead of one on one customer service, i will call them tomorrow and see what we can work out. At this point even if they refund me for the whole damn order i will still never buy from them again.

 

Got an email back from then earlier today, apparently signing my name as "Secretary of The Greater Iowa Reef Society" made them decide to go ahead and work with me on this. Imagine that....

Basically, i still need to return the dead fish but i am getting credited for all 5.

I still will never do business with them again, but it was worth a shot. They do have great packaging and if it wasn't for the weather and the fact that my fed-ex guy called in sick, things probably would have been a lot smoother and i wouldn't have had to deal with their customer service.

This whole incident just makes me really wish we had a better LFS around these parts. We got it rough up here in the Loo'

 

That thought did actually go through my head, they did look VERY similar to feeder goldfish by the time they were dried out.
Posted By lee on 02/12/2008 8:04 PM
thats bull, maybe you could get some feeder goldfish and send them back /site/DesktopModules/NTForums/themes/_default/emoticons/wink.gif" align="absmiddle" border="0">