So if I were to order, let's say, a few RCS, 1 nerite, and around 6 malaysian trumpet snails, how much would that be?
Aquaticarts.com
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They don’t sell Malaysian trumpet snails, and they’re completely out of all neocaridina shrimp except orange and are almost out of those. Shipping would run you a little over $30 for any livestock you order from them, though. So basically just do the price of the livestock you’d like plus $30.
And if you were to only order snails the shipping is $19
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I found Aquatic Arts to be quite good. I ordered 3 ivory mystery snails and 5 amano shrimp. They sent me 4 mystery snails and 7 amano shrimp. All arrived alive and healthy. The snails came in a small deli/Tupperware like container with wet paper towels. All were lively when placed in water. The box was lined with Styrofoam and shipping was $25 for overnight.
I have had them for almost 2 months and they are all still alive. One snail developed an issue with trapped air, but my tank parameters were not the best and I'm relatively new to the hobby so it may have been my tank.
I have had them for almost 2 months and they are all still alive. One snail developed an issue with trapped air, but my tank parameters were not the best and I'm relatively new to the hobby so it may have been my tank.
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The one time I had an issue with some swordtail guppies they were responsive. All the other times I ordered from them (at least 8 other times) everything arrived in excellent condition. I would recommend them but I alway take time to give them feedback - both good and bad. I think they take it seriously. They can also help troubleshoot issues and I have gotten useful advice from them in the past. One of the better online vendors, in my opinion.
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Hi everyone,
This is Dave from Aquatic Arts, I’m the owner. Wanted to make a few quick comments here (from my phone, so please excuse the brevity):
As a preface, we do have nearly 300 Google reviews, which currently stand at an average of a perfect 5.0. We do not ask customers to change negative reviews, we just don’t generally get them. it’s not that mistakes don’t happen, as is inevitable in this business, I think it is more due to how we respond when problems do arise. One of the dark sides to that live arrival guarantee and shipping everything overnight; your fish arrived DOA or with some other problem? We will generally offer you the option of having the order re-shipped, once again via overnight, and we pay that cost, which is generally $40-$60. Because we ship so many highly sensitive animals like high-end plecos, this situation does happen fairly frequently due to our large order volume (we usually ship around 600-700 orders per day).
Some other notes:
1. eBay sellers all have to ship via overnight only. They are aggressively banning people for disregarding the rule. This is why you will often see the listing say overnight shipping, but then it says priority in the description. We do not report people for breaking the rules, as we hardly even bother with eBay due to the upcoming bans on even more species/genus. eBay’s policy is changing to “If something is illegal in one state, it cannot be sold on eBay”. Amazon is even worse and basically allows nothing but inverts, and only in some situations.
2. At this point (and on the point of eBay sellers), priority mail is not ethical for the shipment of live animals. We have stopped using it entirely. FedEx and UPS are having such frequent delivery date failures with 2DA that they have stopped honoring claims related to them. So, we ship any order containing fish and some other types of animals by overnight only, because it is the only way we can offer a live arrival guarantee, a fundamental part of our business. If you want to buy from a hobby breeder that still has access to priority mail, forums like this one are your best bet.
3. We do not make anything on shipping. In fact, we tend to lose money on it when you consider that we use much higher quality packing supplies than the vast majority of our competitors. Check out UPS retail rates sometime; shipping a 4 pound box from Indiana to Arizona for example, retail rate for overnight is over $100. Of course we get a business discount, but when you pay us 40 bucks to ship that box, it probably cost us more like 50. The only places that can realistically offer free shipping have Petco/etc running them (like LiveAquaria), are not shipping overnight, or are just building the cost into the fish/etc. This is why, by our estimation, we are the cheaper than LiveAquaria for a large majority of order configurations even when “free shipping” is triggered on LiveAquaria. As we often hear, there is no such thing as free.
4. Speaking of pricing in general, we offer a 10% discount to newsletter subscribers. The newsletter is why we are sold out of popular items so often; subscribers often get the notification it is back in stock before everyone else. We offer a 15% discount for any order over $200, which knocks at least $30 off that shipping cost while our stock themselves still tend to be cheaper.
5. It is definitely true that we have had some serious growing pains over the years, and you can see that by looking at older reviews, particularly back in 2015 and 2016. I started this business out of a leaky basement in a $40,000 house in Indiana’s most violent ZIP Code. That is when Matt and Preston came on board, and I still have no idea why they did hahaha. From then (2013/2014) to now, we have grown to become the second largest e-commerce retailer of aquarium flora and fauna In the world, behind only LiveAquaria. As of today, the company employs 37 people and a variety of consultants. We are starting to attract talented hobbyists from across the country, and have someone from Colorado and another person from Florida relocating to work for our company because we are actually able to offer careers in the aquarium industry. This is a big part of how we have improved so much in the last few years; we have something like 250 cumulative years of aquatics experience on the staff now. Next year we are moving into a 9 acre warehouse complex just for us, and will be expanding into every corner of the hobby, including a state of the art coral propagation facility. That’s all great for here and now, but along the way we made thousands of mistakes, had some serious quality issues with our favorite shrimp breeder (which led us to set up the largest indoor breeding facility for freshwater shrimp in the United States, so not a total loss), and frequently struggled with delivery/DOA issues caused by priority mail. By sometime next year, all of our neocaridina will be bred in-house from an amalgamation of the best genes we’ve had experience with. You can read more about that on our website if you’d like.
People think I am crazy for saying this because I am essentially telling people to shop with our competitors, but I am still a big believer in buying your fauna from hobby breeders. It helps people support their hobby, gives them a chance at starting a business like I did, and it’s almost always going to be cheaper because they can do things like shipping priority mail and don’t have millions of dollars in overhead every year.
I hope this was informative and gives some context to our decisions and policies. No business is perfect and mine is no exception, but we generally have excellent reviews going back to 2018, and they are very quickly getting even better. If you judge us by our reviews, hopefully you are judging us by reviews from the last couple years, because we have become a completely different business in that time.
Dave B.
Owner and Director of Product Development
Aquatic Arts LLC
This is Dave from Aquatic Arts, I’m the owner. Wanted to make a few quick comments here (from my phone, so please excuse the brevity):
As a preface, we do have nearly 300 Google reviews, which currently stand at an average of a perfect 5.0. We do not ask customers to change negative reviews, we just don’t generally get them. it’s not that mistakes don’t happen, as is inevitable in this business, I think it is more due to how we respond when problems do arise. One of the dark sides to that live arrival guarantee and shipping everything overnight; your fish arrived DOA or with some other problem? We will generally offer you the option of having the order re-shipped, once again via overnight, and we pay that cost, which is generally $40-$60. Because we ship so many highly sensitive animals like high-end plecos, this situation does happen fairly frequently due to our large order volume (we usually ship around 600-700 orders per day).
Some other notes:
1. eBay sellers all have to ship via overnight only. They are aggressively banning people for disregarding the rule. This is why you will often see the listing say overnight shipping, but then it says priority in the description. We do not report people for breaking the rules, as we hardly even bother with eBay due to the upcoming bans on even more species/genus. eBay’s policy is changing to “If something is illegal in one state, it cannot be sold on eBay”. Amazon is even worse and basically allows nothing but inverts, and only in some situations.
2. At this point (and on the point of eBay sellers), priority mail is not ethical for the shipment of live animals. We have stopped using it entirely. FedEx and UPS are having such frequent delivery date failures with 2DA that they have stopped honoring claims related to them. So, we ship any order containing fish and some other types of animals by overnight only, because it is the only way we can offer a live arrival guarantee, a fundamental part of our business. If you want to buy from a hobby breeder that still has access to priority mail, forums like this one are your best bet.
3. We do not make anything on shipping. In fact, we tend to lose money on it when you consider that we use much higher quality packing supplies than the vast majority of our competitors. Check out UPS retail rates sometime; shipping a 4 pound box from Indiana to Arizona for example, retail rate for overnight is over $100. Of course we get a business discount, but when you pay us 40 bucks to ship that box, it probably cost us more like 50. The only places that can realistically offer free shipping have Petco/etc running them (like LiveAquaria), are not shipping overnight, or are just building the cost into the fish/etc. This is why, by our estimation, we are the cheaper than LiveAquaria for a large majority of order configurations even when “free shipping” is triggered on LiveAquaria. As we often hear, there is no such thing as free.
4. Speaking of pricing in general, we offer a 10% discount to newsletter subscribers. The newsletter is why we are sold out of popular items so often; subscribers often get the notification it is back in stock before everyone else. We offer a 15% discount for any order over $200, which knocks at least $30 off that shipping cost while our stock themselves still tend to be cheaper.
5. It is definitely true that we have had some serious growing pains over the years, and you can see that by looking at older reviews, particularly back in 2015 and 2016. I started this business out of a leaky basement in a $40,000 house in Indiana’s most violent ZIP Code. That is when Matt and Preston came on board, and I still have no idea why they did hahaha. From then (2013/2014) to now, we have grown to become the second largest e-commerce retailer of aquarium flora and fauna In the world, behind only LiveAquaria. As of today, the company employs 37 people and a variety of consultants. We are starting to attract talented hobbyists from across the country, and have someone from Colorado and another person from Florida relocating to work for our company because we are actually able to offer careers in the aquarium industry. This is a big part of how we have improved so much in the last few years; we have something like 250 cumulative years of aquatics experience on the staff now. Next year we are moving into a 9 acre warehouse complex just for us, and will be expanding into every corner of the hobby, including a state of the art coral propagation facility. That’s all great for here and now, but along the way we made thousands of mistakes, had some serious quality issues with our favorite shrimp breeder (which led us to set up the largest indoor breeding facility for freshwater shrimp in the United States, so not a total loss), and frequently struggled with delivery/DOA issues caused by priority mail. By sometime next year, all of our neocaridina will be bred in-house from an amalgamation of the best genes we’ve had experience with. You can read more about that on our website if you’d like.
People think I am crazy for saying this because I am essentially telling people to shop with our competitors, but I am still a big believer in buying your fauna from hobby breeders. It helps people support their hobby, gives them a chance at starting a business like I did, and it’s almost always going to be cheaper because they can do things like shipping priority mail and don’t have millions of dollars in overhead every year.
I hope this was informative and gives some context to our decisions and policies. No business is perfect and mine is no exception, but we generally have excellent reviews going back to 2018, and they are very quickly getting even better. If you judge us by our reviews, hopefully you are judging us by reviews from the last couple years, because we have become a completely different business in that time.
Dave B.
Owner and Director of Product Development
Aquatic Arts LLC
Wow, Dave, thanks for the extensive and well-written response! It is very cool that I am personally hearing from the owner of AquaticArts! I will look more into your website, as I can see you are very passionate about this. On a side note, you should ask Mike to make a sub-forum for you, seeing you are the founder of one of the largest aquariums stores in the world haha. Since you can't PM Mike, I'll tag him for you. I wish you more success in your ever growing business!
And to everyone else that has replied (since March LOL), I thank you as well! I am actually planning for a 20 gallon long right now, so I would appreciate it if you could help out in the thread(s) linked in my signature!
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Ok so I’m planning on buying fish and plants from aquatic arts. Any ideas what to buy, I’m thinking I want some bulbs some nice colony fish and some cheap fast growing plants and a couple little oddballs and some schoolers. I have been eying the bentosi ornate tetra. Some ideas would be nice I have 70$
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i know I have them in my 10 gallon biotope and it’s fun watching them interact with my small keyhole chiclids I am going to put them in a 20g or in my 40g eventually
Phew the shipping is cheaper than a Uber to my lfs so I can buy it my mom is going To be so mad at me because the shipping is $44
Phew the shipping is cheaper than a Uber to my lfs so I can buy it my mom is going To be so mad at me because the shipping is $44
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I just went shopping I got bentosi tetra and fucrata I just need to decide if I really wanna spend 8$ on bacopa instead of something cool like a garra
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Dave hearing lot's of good things. Appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and policies. Can you elaborate on your quarantine/care process for fish before you offer them for sale. My concern is it seems that larger operations sometimes skimp on this process.
thanks ken
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I was just looking around for a good aquarium website that had kuhli loaches (orange striped variety). I stumbled upon aquatic arts yesterday and saw they were out of stock but I decided to look again today and I saw they are back in stock along with several other fish. I read the reviews and I cant find a single bad review at all. Im planning this weeknd to find striped kuhli loaches at my local fish store, im thinking of prehaps ordering some from aquatic arts.
Is it worth it? Are they good? Experiences?
Thank you.
Is it worth it? Are they good? Experiences?
Thank you.
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I've ordered from them only a few times, but the livestock has always arrived alive, and it's always exactly what I ordered. Not everything survives the quarantine month, but I don't really fault them for that.
They also tend to throw in extras if you order a bunch of the same critter at once, which helps mitigate any losses you might have. Also, if you can, order next day shipping. The covid has made their other options take longer than normal.
In my experience, kuhlis don't handle transition very well at all and I've had a lot of fatalities just from buying from the LFS, so I don't know how they'd deal with mail.
They also tend to throw in extras if you order a bunch of the same critter at once, which helps mitigate any losses you might have. Also, if you can, order next day shipping. The covid has made their other options take longer than normal.
In my experience, kuhlis don't handle transition very well at all and I've had a lot of fatalities just from buying from the LFS, so I don't know how they'd deal with mail.
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I really plan on using shipping if i can't find any kuhli loaches, I do have one black kuhli loach from petsmart. I know they shouldnt be alone because you will never see them but he defies that rule and always appears for feeding time. Anyways im not sure i would want to go back to petsmart there because they have very very unhealthy fish. I remember i saw a couple orange banded ones at petsupermarket a while ago but with petsupermarket their fish stcoking comes and goes.
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I ordered Sterbai Cory's from them twice. Overnight delivery both times. Ordered 6 the first time and got 7. All arrived alive but 3 died in quarantine. This tank was well established with snails and no longer any other fish. Then I got 4 from a LFS. Only 1 survived. Recently I ordered 3 from AA again, and got 4. One was doa, one looked weak and didn't last long. The other two are doing well. They all looked a little scrawny on arrival, so not real impressed.
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