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David Watsky Senior Editor / Home and Kitchen
David lives in Brooklyn where he’s spent more than a decade covering all things edible, including meal kit services, food subscriptions, kitchen tools and cooking tips. Since earning a BA in English from Northeastern in Boston, he’s toiled in nearly every aspect of the food business, including as a line cook in Rhode Island where he once made a steak sandwich for Lamar Odom. Right now, he’s likely somewhere stress-testing a blender or researching the best way to make bacon. Anything with sesame is his all-time favorite food this week.
Expertise Kitchen tools, appliances, food science, subscriptions and meal kits.
Depending on where you live, finding good, fresh seafood can be tough. If you’re landlocked or just don’t have a reliable fishmonger around, an online seafood delivery service is your best bet for scoring filets of fresh flounder, salmon, tuna and swordfish. The best places to buy fish online will send fresh seafood or fish that’s flash-frozen at the peak of freshness to be thawed and cooked up for a healthy dinner.
You can find both familiar and rare species of fish online.
If you’re underwhelmed with the grocery store selection near you or want access to more variety of fish, oysters, lobster, crab and other seafood, this review may help. We’ve tested many of the top seafood delivery services to find the best places to buy fish online. Your options include traditional online fish markets, along with seafood subscriptions. Some vendors send fish along with beef, pork and chicken to round out your protein haul.
Below you’ll find the best places to buy healthy seafood online in 2024.
Best seafood delivery services
About Fulton Fish Market: The name might sound familiar and that’s because it’s a physical fish market in New York City — the second largest in the world only behind Tokyo’s famously huge fish market. Fulton now offers online sales, in addition to selling wholesale off the docks to some of the largest purveyors and restaurant groups in the world. That means that through Fulton Fish Market you’ll have access to one of the largest selections of fresh fish and seafood anywhere.
You can get almost any variety of fish from wild and farmed salmon to fresh swordfish, halibut, trout and a few harder-to-find species. Fulton also has a wide selection of shellfish including Atlantic and Pacific oysters, lobsters, scallops, crab meat, soft shell crabs, mussels and clams. That’s not all: You can add tasty H. Forman & Son smoked salmon or tins of paddlefish caviar to your order.
How it works: At Fulton Fish Market you order fish by the piece, box or a curated bundle. Different species like fresh tuna, wild snapper and cod are available in different counts and you’ll generally save more per pound if you order in bundles. You can also subscribe and Fulton will send a monthly, bimonthly or weekly curated box of fish starting at $75 per month for four six-ounce portions, but ordering a la carte is the best value.
About SizzleFish: Sizzlefish might have a slightly smaller inventory than Fulton, but not by much. This online seafood vendor still stocks all the hits including wild salmon, sea bass, halibut, trout rockfish and tuna. Everything I tried in a heaping delivery tasted as fresh as any flash-frozen fish I’ve had. There’s also a small selection of meats including filet mignons, ribeyes and ground beef.
One thing to note about SizzleFish is its higher prices, especially if you buy in small amounts. I couldn’t find a single portion of salmon for less than $14, for instance. It’s far more affordable if you order in bulk, like this 14-pack of farm-raised salmon filets for $110. Buying in bulk or signing up for a subscription is the best way to shop on SizzleFish and avoid busting your budget.
About Rastelli’s: Rastelli’s began as a small butcher shop in 1976 serving its small New Jersey community. The family-owned butcher made a name selling some of the best meat possible, but more recently Rastelli’s entered the seafood game, and its catch is as fresh as any on the list. You can score fish-fan favorites like wild tuna, Faroe Island salmon, shrimp, lobster and Icelandic cod. It may not have as big a selection as some others we reviewed but the beauty of Rastelli’s — beyond supporting a small business and not having to leave the house — is ordering your seafood, beef, chicken and pork all in one place.
How it works: Seafood from Rastelli’s can be ordered in semi bulk (eight filets of cod, for instance). You can shop a la carte for fish, shrimp and meats and prices are reasonable, including a pack of two wild-caught swordfish filets for $11. Shipping is free when you spend $200, so you can get the month’s meat and fish supply in a single order and pay nothing for delivery. Use code CNET20 and get $20 off your first order.
About LobsterAnywhere: As the name implies, this company specializes in tasty crustaceans and ships them live and direct from the cold waters of Maine, the lobster capital of the US. They sell only hard-shelled lobsters, including live Maine lobster which are more expensive than soft-shell but are also considered to be the best — so you might be able to find cheaper lobsters in your supermarket, but LobsterAnywhere promises the absolute best in quality. Because of market fluctuation LobsterAnywhere’s prices also fluctuate but are generally competitive.
How it works: There are other offerings available like shrimp and scallops, but Maine lobster is definitely the main draw here. You can order whole, live lobster (or lobsters) as well as lobster tails (frozen and in the shell) or lobster meat (shelled) by the pound. This is not a subscription, so you order exactly what you want and it ships in roughly two days.
About Vital Choice: “Vital Choice” may sound more like a vitamin brand than a seafood market, but that could be by design. The online market sells shoals of fresh seafood, shellfish, canned seafood and more eats from under the sea, but also has a massive section dedicated to seafood-derived health products and supplements like omega-3s, fish oils and immune boosters. Check out the supplements, but the real star of the show remains the sprawling selection of wild sockeye salmon in addition to halibut, sea bass, crab, shrimp, scallops and much more.
Vital Choice puts an emphasis on wild and sustainable seafood where possible, claiming that it limits most of its offerings to fish and shellfish from fisheries that are either certified sustainable or considered sustainable by experts.
How it works: Vital Choice operates like most other online retailers allowing you to build a cart and place a one-time order of any of its seafood products. You can order a single portion of some fish varieties, but many have a six-portion minimum. Any order over $99 ships for free.
There’s also a monthly subscription option called Vital Box with three distinct categories. One option is the Wild Salmon Box which features 10-14 servings of salmon for $112 per month.
Vital Box’s website could probably use an update and some sections aren’t the most intuitive, but there are lots of great options for sustainable seafood and other seafood products, so it’s worth a few broken links and extra clicks to get where you’re going.
About Sea to Table: Americans eat just a small handful of types of fish at home, according to Sea to Table’s Sean Dimin, and one of his aims is to introduce folks to great catches like Atlantic skate, redfish or Dover sole. Sea to Table’s fish all come from US wild domestic fisheries and are caught, landed and processed in the US. To prove it, each pack of fish has a traceability label so you know exactly what you’re getting and where it came from, down to the actual fishing vessel that landed it.
How it works: You can choose from boxes like the Best of the West, Fish Lover’s Box and Salmon Lover’s Box, which features fourteen full servings of fish from sustainable fisheries, including Maine redfish, scallops and skate, starting at just $179 (plus shipping). Choose either a one-time order or a (slightly cheaper) subscription to be delivered every two, four or eight weeks. Everything ships FedEx ground, fresh-frozen and packed with dry ice in recycled denim packaging.
About Riviera Seafood Club: If you’re looking for a really special piece of tuna belly, hamachi or yellowtail to sear quickly on the grill or serve sashimi-style, I would direct your attention to this family-owned online seafood purveyor based out of Los Angeles. The Ito family procures some of the best high-end sushi-grade fish, along with some more common catches like wild salmon, black cod, prawns and unagi. I had a filet of fresh bluefin tuna delivered and it was an immaculately fresh piece of fish with gorgeous marbling and rich flavor.
How it works: Riviera Seafood Club ships fresh or flash-frozen fish to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and most of it is sashimi-grade, meaning you can slice and eat — no cooking necessary. It’s also very reasonably priced considering the quality with a six-ounce Hamachi yellowtail collar starting at $14. To avoid shipping charges, you’ll have to get your cart over a certain dollar amount between $125 and $375 depending on where you live.
About Wild Alaskan Company: As you might have gathered from the name, this company specializes in fresh wild-caught seafood including wild salmon. It is generally thought to be both healthier and more sustainable than farmed fish, and company founder and Alaska native Arron Kallenberg has set his sights on helping American consumers gain access to good, fresh fish. All the fish is caught either in Alaska or the Pacific Northwest with a commitment to sustainability and transparency. As of August 2020, the company added wild-caught Alaskan Dungeness crab as a member special.
How it works: The company bills itself as a share more than a traditional retailer or marketplace and offers a monthly subscription. You can choose from salmon-only boxes, whitefish boxes or a combo, and the monthly shipments of fish (frozen at “peak freshness”) start at $145 per month for 12 six-ounce portions. You can skip months or pause your membership anytime at no extra charge.
About KnowSeafood: This direct-to-consumer seafood shop puts transparency and seafood tracing front and center. Every step in the online fish purveyors blockchain is traced and you can see it all when you scan the barcode that adorns each piece of seafood. Scan the code and you’ll see when and where your scallops were caught, processed and transported, plus information on how best to defrost and store them. All the seafood is flash-frozen for peak freshness and everything I got in my delivery was just that — fresh. KnowSeafood uses only heavily vetted fisheries around the world.
How it works: You can either create a custom box of seafood from KnowSeafood’s selection of fish, shellfish and prepared foods including salmon and tuna burgers or choose one of the online market’s curated seafood boxes and enjoy a variety of healthy fish.
What type of seafood can you order online?
Is the seafood from seafood delivery services fresh?
Is fish from a seafood delivery services fresher than a fish market?
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The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.
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