One of my goals when writing about the aquarium hobby, is to help people become educated consumers. The world of retail (retail on anything, not just aquarium livestock) is often designed to encourage people to make fast decisions, build-up excitement and enact a knee-jerk buyer reaction. Reef aquariums often don’t react well to knee jerk reactions, impulse purchases or quickly made decisions. When setting out to get new livestock, it’s best to be methodical, smart and skeptical. It’s also important to understand the guarantee policy the livestock you buy is covered under. Most LFS style shops don’t offer a guarantee, since the aquarist is able to visually assess the livestock, before making a purchase. Also, getting the livestock from the shop, to their aquarium, is the aquarist’s job in LFS sales scenarios. When ordering online, aquarists don’t get a chance to visually inspect the livestock their buying, other than a picture, which may or may not represent the coral they are buying. They also aren’t directly in control of getting the livestock from the outlet, to their aquarium. Since this type of purchase is unconventional from an aquarium livestock viewpoint, the animals are often covered by a guarantee policy, and sometimes this is the only assurance the aquarist has that the animals they are getting will be alive, and resemble what they were shown on a website. When I worked in real estate sales, I was surprised that far more training existed to teach agents how to persuade buyers to make a purchase, rather than assess all the variables tied in with their families’ financial future and prospective home. Some vendors may be more concerned with convincing an aquarist that they need a “rare” coral, then they are with making sure their customers have thriving, healthy tanks. Since we spend thousands of dollars on reef livestock, that guarantee policy needs to be steadfast. Some aquarists (myself included) order 99% of all their livestock online, and sooner or later, you will attempt to act on a guarantee policy. In order to help educate aquarists, I will break down four model guarantee policies. I will explain what to look for, what to question and how to perceive the policies, along with a risk assumption for each one. 
Policy 1: Live arrival guaranteed with stipulations. Coral not guaranteed past live arrival: I call these types of guarantee policies coral ordering prenuptial agreements.… More:
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