If anyone here is a gardener, you might be familiar with the Garden Watchdog site on davesgarden.com. This site is a database about mail order nurseries and other garden related businesses, where customers can post a review, good or bad, for the general public to read. This site has proven very invaluable to me in making purchase decisions about mail order palnts, and I've been very happy ordering from the top-rated nurseries on the site. We need something similar for mail order egg and chick vendors. I just got some replacement eggs from an Ebay vendor -- the first batch came filthy, coated with feces, and as I feared, out of 8 shipped, 2 came broken due to poor packaging, and of the remaining 6, 2 more had fine spider vein cracks. Having been in the incubator 8 1/2 days now, only one is developing. The rest either got bacteria and formed "blood rings" or are just doing nothing. The vendor did reship 6 eggs today. Of the 6, one came smashed -- again, the packaging job was pretty bad -- each egg was loosely wrapped in thin bubble wrap, and then just thrown into a Priority Mail box with some newspaper and a couple of those clear air packs. Not enough packaging to prevent them from bouncing around. I haven't unwrapped them yet to see how many of the others are cracked, aside from the one which was totally smashed and oozing yolk. OTOH, last year I received several batches of eggs from a couple of different vendors that were so well wrapped and packed that I was genuinely in awe of all of the time and care these folks took to insure their eggs would arrive in good condition. It would be nice if there was an online database where customers could leave reviews of their experiences with online egg and chick vendors, so that others could check out both the good and bad comments. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the computer savvy to do something like that, but I just wanted to throw the idea out into the cyber-ether. Maybe that could even be done on this forum and prove a useful tool for the online community here. I know that I would not have ordered goose eggs from the person I did had I had the ability to read what others really thought of their experiences with them, if those experiences were like mine. Unfortunately, the Ebay reviews of this vendor were very limited and not very helpful. I know ordering online is a big risk, but this would help, IMHO.
Good idea. There is a forum to give feedback for individual vendors and traders on garden web. It's about plants, but it could be used for chickens. It's all set up and they do listed ebay venders. It would be better to have one here, but in the meantime.....
DavesGarden DOES have a forum for Hatcheries!!! http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/c/4436/ This page is for Cackle hatchery but, they have other hatcheries listed as well. I know what you are saying. I received Silkie eggs that were not packed well. I contacted the seller and never heard back from them. While the eggs were not damaged, they are all scrambled with no air cells due to postal handling and poor packing.
