Let me start off by saying that we do not carry fish here at BigBrandWholesale.com, so we have never personally shipped any. HOWEVER, our family is huge fish enthusiasts. We have two 55 gallons, a 250 pond and a breeder tank so we have ordered from all over the world, years on end.  Here's a couple of our tanks and fish:

Blood Parrots:

Our newest baby newt, born in 2020:

Like most fish collectors, we order these fellows online so we can get exotics that are not available locally. With that being said, we have seen what works and what doesn’t. So here’s what we learned from successful (and FAILED) online perishables sellers, in addition to some awesome advice that I can give you from 15+ years of shipping:

1. PREVENT LEAKAGE!! I cannot emphasize how important it is to make sure your parcel doesn’t leak. This includes CONDENSATION. If the exterior parcel becomes wet, the carrier will be forced to stop transit and discard it (YIKES!). The reason for this is that the carrier has no idea WTF liquid is leaking. For all they know it could be toxic. This happens with ANY type of liquid, even perfumes that break or shampoos that leak. Heck, I’ve read so many nightmare stories about those little Glade Wall Plug-In things having faulty package design that causes the oil to leak all over and the parcel ends up getting discarded before it ever reaches the buyer. So, the first thing you want to do is LINE YOUR BOX in some way. In my opinion, the absolute easiest way would be a self-seal poly mailer or similar. Open the mailer up and put it inside the box before you add anything else. Think of it like a trash can liner. You can then fill the poly with whatever is needed and seal it up. IF you do this, worst case scenario, the buyer gets the parcel with some condensation or water in the bottom of the plastic poly, which is fine because the buyer still got the parcel. If the water did damage something you can address that issue, which is far better than the entire parcel being thrown away. Here’s one of the UNLINED parcels I received… box was completely soaked through the bottom. The bottom of the box was so wet that merchandise had literally fallen out. Honestly I cannot believe USPS even delivered this! Yes, everything inside was dead:

Here’s another UNLINED box. Look how much the parcel deteriorated from being soaking wet!!!:

You can score pretty cheap poly bags on Amazon.  It doesn't matter if the bag is a color or clear.  Your only goal here is to make sure the package gets to the buyer by lining the interior of the box:

2. COLD PACKS - Let me tell you what absolutely DOES NOT WORK first. For some strange reason buyers believe that they can put paper towels in the freezer. THIS DOES NOT WORK. There is NOTHING ABSORBENT to keep the towel frozen. Yes, it may seem frozen when you ship it but within 12 hours (probably less!) it is room temp. Every time I have ordered through any seller who has shipped using paper towels, the fish or worms have arrived dead (DOA) and the package is a nightmare. Here’s one of my orders for a half-pound of live blackworms:

As you can see from the image above, all the seller did was throw in frozen paper towels. They turned into wet-mess:

What I opened up was a HOT, bloody, wet disaster. Everything was DOA.

There’s no way around it; you need THICK items that retain the cold temp. Not to mention, they leak through the box!

Of course you can purchase actual cold packs. This is how the larger, professional sellers ship.

However, I saw such a cool idea from a small eBay seller. She would wet an infant diaper, put it in a plastic bag, put that bag inside another bag then freeze it! Every time I could buy from her, 100% of my purchased arrived in perfect, happy condition! Let’s compare costs of double-bagged-diaper versus actual cold packs:

On Amazon you can get around 50 cold packs for under $20:

Let’s say the average cost per pack is around 40 cents each. Also on Amazon you can get the diapers. I didn’t spend a ton of time looking for the best price, but this listing seems to be close:

So let’s say you put one diaper + a double-bag into each order; your cost is going to end up being just a few cents under the actual cold packs. Being that the difference in cost is trivial, I would personally opt for the actual cold packs. But that is just my opinion.

3. HEAT PACKS - most of my purchases do not require heat unless it is shipped during our Michigan Winter. However, I do buy horned worms for my bearded dragons and these do require heat. What every seller does is use actual heat packs:

However, you can’t just buy whatever heat pack is cheapest. You have to look at the TIME DURATION the heat pack lasts. Some last as little as 8 hours. Others, like the packs shown above, are designed to last 72 hours! Thats a massive difference!

4.  PROPER PACKAGING = DOUBLE BAG...ALWAYS DOUBLE BAG! No matter how strong your bags are, for the love of God, please double bag! For some reason, the old school “fish bag” with the rubber band at the top seems MORE SECURE than the ziplock. When I bought those blackworms, the seller put them in a single sandwich bag. The bag broke open and this was what I ended up with:

GROSS, right?! I immediately noticed a big hole in the bottom of the cheap ziplock:

The bottom line is, a single ziplock snack-size or sandwich baggie just DOES NOT WORK! So here’s some interesting info for you:

The typical “fish bag” is approximately “2M” / 2 Millimeters Thick:

But, a 2 Mil bag is a 2 Mil bag, so you don’t *need* to buy a “fish bag”. You can instead get “poly bags” which are usually cheaper:

IN CLOSING, If you want to see a genuinely professional looking shipment, order from AquariumFishSale.com because is the best packing I have ever seen… EVER. Here’s how they pack:

The photos above are from Rebecca and Karen, I had taken absolutely outstanding photos of all of my orders and for the love of God, I cannot find them in my Cloud. I would strongly encourage you to place an order through them because you will be hella impressed with it. Let me note: I have no affiliation with this business at all; I am just a very happy, repeat buyer. You can read my Google Review about them:

Anyways, I don’t get anything if you order through them. In fact, they don’t even know I am writing this about them. But I truly do encourage you to buy something so you can see how awesome they pack!  

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