No 14 Day Guarantees Here!
Responsible Aquarist? Then you don’t want this anyway.
Ahh, the hallowed 14-day guarantee. The “ironclad guarantee to our commitment to quality” is the marketing song…. Sorry, it’s a bygone artifact from ancient times that really does a disservice to our hobby.
The 14-day guarantee was never about quality. The 14-day guarantee was invented in the 1990s by the first online retailers that had to prove that you could buy a fish on this new thing called the ‘Internet’ and it could ship via “Overnight Delivery Service” and still be alive when it arrived at your place. These were all very new and different ideas 20 years ago.
How do we know? We were there.
Things have changed in 20 years but that 14-day albatross still hangs on. Here are some fun facts…
- Less than 50% of online customers use guarantees. Ever.
- 15% of customers use the guarantees very extensively. Unless checks are in place, some inexperienced hobbyists will just keep ordering beyond their capabilities.
Those heralded 14 day guarantees can be really bad for our hobby. They enable inexperienced hobbyists to buy marine life that might be beyond their capabilities. In this case, the LFS have it generally right. No guarantees. It encourages the hobbyist to make sure that their tank, and their abilities, are ready to assume the responsibility of owning new marine life.
The problem for those old-style 14-day guarantees by the mega-corporations is that the guarantee is so central to their marketing that they can’t abandon it. So, 100% of their customers are paying exorbitant prices (like 25% more) to pay for the minority of the customers that use and sometimes abuse the guarantee system.
We think in this modern age, there is a much better way….
At Reefs4Less.com, you don’t pay extra to fund the guarantee payments to others. We don’t offer those 14-day guarantees so we can save responsible hobbyists considerable money. And remember, you are buying the same quality fish, using the same expert packing & shipping systems.
Still not convinced? Ok, just for you skeptics; we will offer a 5-day guarantee at an extra cost to give you that extra peace of mind…..but again…you don’t need it.