Arizona Gardens (azgardens.com) = Liars!

I bought from azgarden's two years ago;
shrimp arrived dead, so did half the plants.
plant portions were tiny, and everything
was thrown into a plain cardboard box with
no special $35 packaging. all fish were fine,
but far more juvenile than was expected.

I photographed and emailed what was dead
while still in the bags, and they replaced it,
and even let me add a few items I paid for
without any additional shipping cost to me.
It was clearly their fault because instead of
shipping on a Mon/Tuesday they shipped on
a Thursday, so everything arrived on Monday.

I have been tempted to buy from azgardens
again, but have always managed to second
source what I needed, so thankfully I won't
fall for that mistake twice.

I agree many of their livestock descriptions
are misleading, but I see a lot of that kind
of abuse on other web sights, so I can't
really blame azgardens for the same tactic.

this is why people should search forums and
ask questions about future purchases before
getting stuck with the wrong fixture, a non
aquatic plant, or a fish that will chase around
and eat all their other community tank fish :icon_roll

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I bought 2 bags of eco-complete free ship
from aquariumplants.com a year ago, so I
don't know if you can fairly add such a dry
goods purchase to your opinion survey, but
the emails, timing and packaging were fine.

back then they had just started selling those
5gal drums of SMS for $30 shipped, so at the
time they were bending over backwards to
make forum buyers like us happy. it was also
before they had very many plants to sell.

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/g...8-new-black-substrate-aquariumplants-com.html

ironically, now a year later, I'm about to
abandon that eco-complete, and use the
SMS I bought from Lesco in my new tanks,
so I wish I had been more trusting with AP :redface:

My LFS actually recommended them because they had such a large variety of shrimp and he said AZG won't sell to retailers.

I pretty much ordered one of their algae clean up crews that they advertise online along with some clams and a couple of clown plecos. The packaging was worse than I had expected especially after seeing the shipping charges. The fish bags were stuffed in with a few scraps of packing foam. Almost half of the shrimp and almost all of the ottos were DOA. This was despite the fact that the shipment arrived next day and was taken inside and bags floated in the tank almost immediately. The two plecos were both missing their tail fins and they forgot my order of clams. They did throw in lots of extra nerite snails, but some were DOA and a bunch died withing a couple of weeks. Within the next week, I pretty much lost all of the livestock except for the plecos, one flying fox, a few cherry shrimp, and 6 out of 8 SAE's.

They were very prompt with refunding my money, however without needing to see pictures including the cost of the plecos. I just called them and they credited my card back the following Monday. I was still out of my shipping fee. Lesson learned. I found their customer service to be good, but out of sympathy for the livestock, I will not order fish or shrimp from them again.

I just read their Shipping and FAQ pages. Very funny stuff. While they lay out what everything is and how to go about certain things, they are very obnoxious with the methods that they follow.

You have to have specific subject lines or they will be SPAMMED OUT. (LOL)

Quote from shipping section:

"Two charges on your credit card from us? All too often we are asked this question. Yes, our company charges separately for your product invoice and your shipping. We charge for shipping after your order is packed because these charges are based on the ACTUAL weight of your package, as we do not try to guess your shipping fee or base your shipping fees on the dollar amount you spend. Monday is our usual day to charge for product, and Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the days we charge for shipping. We charge FedEx list rates for the day your shipment goes out, as rates can vary from day to day."

Based on the experiences you guys have shared, I would take a guess and say that someone is stepping on the scale when they weigh the packages for shipping.

This "hit the card twice" mentality is a new one for me. I buy a lot of stuff over the Internet and I have never had my card hit just for shipping costs. I buy big, heavy, and sometimes live things. I have never seen or heard of this.

The other thing is who the hell ships out live animals on Thursdays? If you are going to ship out animals, you should have them at the shipper on Monday morning or Tuesday at the latest. Shipping beyond that (especially to people on the other side of the country) doesn't make any sense at all. Sure it is overnight shipping, but if something gets screwed up on Friday during the shipping phase it is very possible that it will delay things past Saturday. That automatically means that the package can be expected on Monday or Tuesday.

No margin for error and I guess it is easy to issue store credit for livestock losses.

Question to those of you that have lost animals/plants/etc. Were you issued a store credit and did the animals ship for free or did you have to pay for shipping again?