I have a feedomatic and find that the pellets don't feed down into the feeding compartments very well. Twice a day I manually top the feeding compartments up. This morning my dorking has torn her comb on it. It has stopped the wild birds from feeding, and there's no wastage. I'm not happy with them and I'm on the search for something that feeds freely but has no wastage from wild birds, rodents.
That is a common complaint on the
Amazon dot com listings, feed not flowing. Try waxing the inside of the feeder with car wax.
I see they have have stopped the Olba feeder sales on
Amazon.
Amazon policies would bankrupt a company due to the return policy, these treadle feeders need tweaking and set up, and after a certain return rate
Amazon stops the sales. The plastic parts were getting complaints too, rats chewing through the plastic. Glad we didn't pursue using plastic parts.
Shipping has skyrocketed on everything in the last year too. Our UPS rep said that
Amazon has squeezed them down so low they they are losing money and had to raise the independent sellers's shipping rates. Plus they jacked up the dimensional weight, our 15 pound product used to ship at 21 pounds which was bad enough; now it ships at 24 pounds! Ouch! We have looked at zone skipping, where you send pallets of feeders to warehouses across the country via truck line (as low as $7.00 each) and ship the final zone or two zones via regular package service. The problem is that it only works in the furthest zones and saves around $10.00 which is eaten up with warehouse storage fees and picking fees.
The feeder that is selling the most right now is the Chinese treadle feeder, very small and flimsy, you can only put about 1/4 full or the birds will rake the feed out so it only holds maybe two, three pounds of feed. They are guillotine style feeders so it is slow to train but they do work. Not rat proof but they are water proof. We have 300 of them built and the next container load that comes in will bring them to the U.S.. Tried making them here, too expensive, $40.00 in labor/overhead compared to $4.00 at my Philippine shop. However the Chinese have done what they always do to a product and flooded the market with them and drove the price down. There are dozens of sellers of the same aluminum product online but only the cheapest are selling any of them. Poor reviews of course, leaking, slow to train the birds, nuts falling off. The only thing that is keeping the sales going for the Chinese is selling them at cost to dump them. I mean they cost $16.00 in China, are going to cost at a minimum $13.00 to ship within one zone in the U.S., so how can they sell for $25.00 delivered?
We still sell quite a few a day. The cheap feeders haven't impacted us. I think the Grandpa feeder is still selling well too so people will pay for quaility.
