Friends,
I will speak out coming from a wholesalers perspective about this high percentage of doa's/daa's being claimed.
Sea Dwelling Creatures, Inc. ships about 500 retailers per week....every week, year round. That does not count for the many local retailers that come and shop every week.
SDC tracks all doa's and complaints reported on an excel sheet and reviews that list daily.
SDC has a company doa policy that has been in effect for many years and issues credits for doa's when requested by the customer. SDC has a 3% deductable for any doa's reported within 24 hours, but any problems after the 24 hour period are still welcomed and considered for further credit.
It is the company policy that doa credits are issued to the customer on their next invoice. All credit's and doa's reported are filed and reviewed by owners in a timely manner so they can be made aware of any consistent problems for husbandy and buying purposes.
Yesterday, I spoke to three new customers of SDC as a follow up call on their first orders, and this was the result.
One customer Minneapolis - $2100 order, delayed in Phoenix 6 hours and received their order finally at 7pm the day after leaving LAX. Customer reported to me that 5 fish were doa, the rest were doing great. This customer did not bother to report any doa's as their privelege was to.
Another new customer received a $650 order in Arkansas... and received ZERO doa. All fish were doing great and customer was very happy. Nice guy...and now happy to have finally tried SDC.
The last customer I spoke to yesterday was a nice lady in South Carolina. She took a $1200 order and had no doa's to report although she did say she lost a few fish over night. Fish were doing great, eating and was also very happy.
I understand this is just a small sampling obviously of yesterdays follow up calls, but I can assure you that it's more like these than others who are having major problems.
I would estimate our national average is around 2% doa overall, but I would say it's only that high because of freight delay's, weather related, or just certain customers only buy difficult species or high end items which if one of those die, it's a higher percentage of their invoice.
I have a few customers that quarantine their fish some for 7 days and others for 30 days.
Those reporting 30 day doa's/daa's are usually in the 10-12% range.
We have many customers that report perfect shipments with ZERO doa's and we also have many customers that report minor doa's regularly too.
I can honestly say that any customer that calls us with anything over 10% doa is a HUUUGE problem and we consider it to be very unusual. We train our sales staff to request specific information when such an occurance happens. Questions like, "Was your shipment delayed"? Was the water warm? Were the ice/heat packs still cold/warm? Were the boxes trashed by the airlines? Did you notice anything unusual about the dead animals that could give us clues as to why the fish were dead?
This does happen from time to time and we try to deal with it as logically and scientifically as possible.
This talk of 60% averaage doa's/daa's is just way out of anything we have ever seen over the 10 years or more that we have been in business.
We have had 30 box shipments sent to New York, Not paid for by the customer due to "could not get to the bank to get that Certified Check as promised" so we tell the airlines to ship it back to us. That was about 6 months ago and we had 5% doa's.
Please feel free to ask me any questions regarding our doa's. We are not hiding anything and in fact, are happy to disclose our findings from our studies.
By the way, MAC guidelines address customer's doa's and complaints where they are reported and documented in such a manner so they can be studied and dealt with in a timely fashion...pretty much like we have been doing for years anyway.
SDC tracks all fish and coral vendor by vendor so we always know who's fish are doing well, and whose aren't. If you are ever in SDC, you will see on every tank, the common name for the fish or coral, and a vendor number code next to the name.
Any questions?
Eric
