Buying Marine Livestock Online

E-tailers for all manner of products have seen a dramatic increase in sales over the past decade, so it should not surprise anyone that marine livestock e-tailers have flourished as well. Already a billion-dollar industry, online marine livestock sales are only going to expand. With such growth come new issues. While there are many important factors when choosing an online retailer, few have as much influence on the health and well-being of your new livestock as the vendor’s choice of a shipping carrier.

UPS and FedEx are the most commonly used carriers for shipping marine livestock between online supplier and retail customer in the United States. While both companies are competitively priced for overnight delivery, and both have similar on-time delivery statistics, the reality is that FedEx and UPS are quite different in their policies regarding live animals.

There was a time when both FedEx and UPS would not ship any animals, marine livestock included. Today, FedEx still does not officially accept live animal shipments as part of its regularly scheduled service, but they do accept them on an “exception basis.” According to their stated policy, “[l]ive animals will be accepted when the shipment is coordinated and approved by the FedEx Live Animal Desk.” In short, to ship an animal such as a fish through FedEx, the shipper must be a FedEx certified shipper of live animals.

UPS does not have a certification process. Instead, UPS simply states which live animals are permitted for shipment. If the “animal” in question is on the list of acceptable live animals, and if you’re willing to pay to ship Next Day Air and follow the packaging guidelines, then UPS will ship the animal. FedEx, on the other hand, requires shippers of live animals to have their packaging tested and pre-approved by FedEx. “FedEx came to us in the industry and asked questions,” Mark Martin from Blue Zoo Aquatics, a leading online supplier of marine livestock, explains. “They developed a best practices for shipping livestock which they incorporated into their training program.”

The care FedEx takes when it comes to shipping live animals is one reason the majority of e-tailers of marine livestock use FedEx instead of UPS, although it is no doubt a significant factor that it is generally easier for retailers to negotiate discounts with FedEx without doing the type of volume that UPS requires for a retailer to be eligible for comparable savings.

Still, some major retailers believe UPS is the better bet. “UPS is far better than FedEx in my experience,” says a spokesperson for Pacific East Aquaculture, Inc, one of the online retailers that uses UPS exclusively. “We used FedEx for seven years and switched to UPS about one and a half years ago. Both companies can have issues, but UPS is much more consistent with our deliveries. We have excellent customer service with UPS including a great rep.”

At this point, FedEx has been willing to work with online retailers of marine livestock as a matter of company policy. UPS has worked with some retailers based on the relationship between the retailer and the UPS rep assigned to that retailer, but there has been no proactive company-wide policy on best practices for shipping marine livestock. UPS ships over fifteen and a half million packages a day to nearly two hundred countries. FedEx delivers just over six million packages. Perhaps the trade-off for delivering 15.6 million packages a day is that your one package—living animals or not—is just not going to get the personalized attention you expect when asked what Brown can do for you.

Shipping Live Animals

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