Questions about shipping snakes

[Charis]

Depends a bit on how you want to ship. (yourself) There is becoming FedEx Certified yourself, it's a bit longer process and can be either relatively painless or a major PITA, depending on what representative you get. Or you can use Ship Your Reptiles or Reptile Express without becoming certified. If you are only shipping a few packages a year, it is probably going to cost less to use either SYR or RE. I like and use SYR, I like that they offer insurance for live animals, FedEx does not and I don't think RE does either. But I've for the most part also heard great reviews on RE.

SYR has a very good FAQ on their site about pretty much everything you might need to know about how to ship.

If you start to ship a decent volume, with either FedEx direct or with the other two, you can start to negotiate a lower price on your shipments, the more you ship, the more willing and the lower the price they will be willing to go. I only have experience with SYR and so could be wrong but I think it is a bit easier to negotiate with SYR or RE when you are still fairly low volume, I don't think FedEx wants to mess with you unless you are either shipping out a pretty set, decent number of boxes every month or very large numbers of boxes at least most of the year or both.
Anyway, after using SYR for about 2 years, with an account in good standing and just starting to really get our breeding business off the ground and using them much more frequently, they very easily agreed to give me a few more percentage points off the normal 20% less than direct FedEx prices they give everyone. I'm still doing less than 40 packages a year, so I imagine if we get a bit bigger, they would be easy to work with on increasing our discount again.
That's why the big, massive volume breeders can offer so much better shipping prices than the smaller, more hobby lever breeders.