Selling off Dubia Colony, need advice
I'm not really sure where to go for the proper advice, thought this as good a place as any to start. While I have kept reptiles and such for many years, I have never been into breeding/selling anything. I'm a completely new to selling anything at all. Recently my bearded dragon passed away. Had him for many many years. I don't think I am going to be getting another one. What I still have going though is the Dubia roach colony. I've had that for more years than I can count as well.
With just a single dragon, you can imagine my colony is much larger than my single dragon could eat. So i've just given roaches away, donated to pet stores, etc. I never really thought about making a buck off of them. I decided to see about actually selling this thing off, or maybe selling it off little by little. What would it be worth. Came across a post from one of the actual Dubia Roach breeders, and while I probably can't get what he does, I think he was listing adult females for $1 and Males for $2 each? Or maybe it was the other way around. If i even got half that, I must have given away $1000's of dollars in roaches by now. I was rather shocked. I didn't remember what I paid for my initial colony start up. It was small, and I think it sat for 8 months before I even started feeding off of it.
Anyway, this thing is quite large now. I've got all sizes in there. Probably couldn't ship the entire thing in one fell swoop unless it was a local pickup deal. And even then, short of trying to count all of those roaches i wouldn't even know what to charge.
Seems kind of overwelming to me of where to even begin.
How do I price them? Adult, sub adult, etc?
How do I ship them? Is this a priority overnight mail thing, FedEX, UPS? Probably really showing my ignorance here which is OK, better to ask now and find out the right way to do this then do it all wrong and be labeled as a bad shipper after the fact.
Where would I even go about finding the packaging to ship these guys in? I remember i had a plastic dish so to speak, with a lid, had screen holes on it, and the lid was taped on. That was just sitting inside a cardboard box. Pretty much it. I don't think i've ever seen a plastic dish like that at Walmart or something. There some place you can order stuff like this online?
Maybe there is some forum, post, internet site where i could be directed that could help? Just seems like after seeing what I have here, the potential is there to get quite a few dollars off of this colony if I could figure out how to do it.
thanks in advance,
Brian
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