Why buy bettas bulk?

Lots of people keep asking why we only sell bulk and rarely per individual bettas. A very common reason is that we don't have time to deal with individual betta (taking pictures, sending per fish basis, etc).

Things that you are not aware is that we sell bulk because learning from our experience as buyer we always wanted the seller to sell bulk!

The thing that you may not be aware of is that, if you want to delve into breeding bettas, which is what we're hoping you do, then you need to buy bulk. Breeding requires trial and error, particularly for new breeders, and lots of the time you fail with 1 pair and may get very successful with another pairing. If you only buy 1 pair, then you will soon discover that you need to purchase yet another pair and start the process again.

Bulk buying is also advantageous if you want to make sure that you get the 'best' genes out of the line. It's akin to choosing the best of the brood in a spawn of 300 fry. One of the fry would be the best of your choice to continue to the next level, why settle with something else? Spawn them as many times, choose the best of any combination, and move on. Chances are, you will not be able to go back on your decision once you've spawned them. It takes a good 2 or 3 months till you know the outcome of your pairing choice :) Buying bulk gives you that choice to choose from the pack and therefore prioritize your breeding plan.

Sure there are other advantages such as saving shipping money, getting them bulk also saves you lots of money that otherwise cost too much to buy them individually. Some people buy bulk cause they want to populate their display tanks, after all, bettas are very beautiful fish to display. Why pay the premium for individual fish when you can get lots of them cheaper ;)

The beauty of buying bulk, as we like to enjoy it from time to time, is getting surprises on what you get. In most cases we won't know what we sent you, they're too young to judge on their quality. There are times we realized that we've sold our best of the brood unknowingly till the buyer shows the fish at much later stage. Basically you get the first pick (randomly through us) of the brood. Some buyers were even willing to pay higher price so long they can pick and choose what they're buying. That's more than acceptable so long they stick with the agreed number of fish per transaction - remember, selling bulk helps us to reduce the number of fish in our stock.

One of the question raised was whether buying bulk of 10 is good enough to "cover all bases". We don't believe so, no. In order to get a pair of the best of the brood, you will need more than 5 pairs to see what kind of pairing is preferable, and with the trial and error (with failure is taken into account) you will need at least 2 of the same males for every plan that you have. If you simply want to "just spawn" a pair, then yes, 10 is a good number to start. But if you are being choosy or simply have plans then you may want to consider to get more than 10.

Reflecting back, we were much more delighted if someone would be able to sell us bulk, if only importation cost isn't so high. Locally available stock can't satisfy our needs/goals and most of the time we ended up importing the necessary fish.