My experiences thus far...
I'll give a brief rundown of all the online vendors I've used so far and luckily I've had nothing but good luck with them... I will give them a grade and that would be overall based on price/service/ and speed of shipping/recieving this is subjective and your mileage may vary here... Marinedepot.com - I had a good experience with them, they answered all my emails quickly and I had no issues whatsoever with shipping, I believe it took about 3 days ground shipping and the shipping was reasonable. Pricing on what I ordered was reasonable as well. Overall grade- B Hellolights.com- Fantastic experience here, customer service is top notch and they will do anything in their power to take care of you. all I ordered was a ballast and they treated me like I was a $1000 customer! Can't say much more about them other than that, pricing and shipping was very good... Grade- A+ in my book. Dr Foster Smith- Good experience with them, I've only ordered dry goods through them but have been extremely happy with their service. For such a huge company they definitely have an eye on customer service, well at least they seemed to in my situations. I have ordered twice from them and the pricing has been the best I have seen yet. Check the prices on Salt and you will be amazed, even after shipping the prices are fantastic! Shipping time wasn't very fast at all but that's not a huge issue in my circumstance, just something to think about if you needed something yesterday and their ground shipping takes about 5 days IME. Grade overall- B Reefscavengers.com- Great experience with these guys, they're a fairly small operation out of Florida that has a diver that gets them clean up crews and things of that nature. I ordered a clean up crew through them when I first started my tank. after shipping it was only $30ish for a solid cleanup crew and I had all of the critters survive!! They ship priority mail but I had no DOA's and their service is top notch!! Overall grade - A I will add a few more as I get time but I figured I would start us off.

Dr F & S (sand, powerheads, heaters, more...) Great service, prices and things arrive when they are supposed to. Grade A Marco Rocks (rocks) Ordered rocks, emailed every two weeks with no reply. After 10 weeks I started a claim with Paypal. Three days later I had a reply that there was an accident and my order was marked complete. My emails all ended up in his spam (he says). He offered to quickly send the rock out (plus extra) but I had already made other arrangments. Grade D- Elite Reefs (zoa frags) They send out a flyer about once a week with zoa frags for $10 each. ($21 shipping) I bought 5 and a "mystery frag" Once they opened I would say 4 looked like the pictures (the mystery was GSP :roll: ) but didn't look like they were in that great of shape. After about a month only two frags and two single zoas have survived. I have only lost one other zoa frag in my tank since starting (of about 20). Only $10 and packaged pretty well. Grade C-

Doc Fosters +I am in love with Great service you call them and get a live person within a minute or 2 and it always sounds like a nice grandma is talking to you. I have ordered from doc for 3 years now and my only bad expriance was recently when I ordered a Skimmer and it came broken so I called them up ready to chew them out. but then how could I chew out a nice lady who I imaged to be my grandma. Anyhow I told them my corals health was in need so they overnighted me a new one which happened to be the wrong iteam "some hose"so then they reovernighted the skimmer and now I am happy with doc again. I would give them an A+ even after this crazy mix up I have order somewhere around 20 times from them. - they are base in WI so it dose take about 7 days to ship I also ordered from liveaquia we got the order next day b/c it was cleaner pack thing 2 things came dead called and no questions asked they refunded right away over great experiance,

I love Marine Depot. They're out of SoCal and often things get here in three days with free shipping over $175! Only once with MarineDepot, I had a problem. A SCWD was leaking around one of the nipple arms where the two halfs are welded together. They called me back the next morning for an RMA and discussed the situation. 1) I could ship it back and when they recieved it they would ship me a replacement, or 2) They could charge an additional SCWD to my card and ship it out today and then credit my account once the one I shipped back to them was received. I chose option 2 and was very happy.