Just so there is more than one opinion on this topic. I have bought about 85% of my fish shipped in. They are intransit anywhere from 24 to those boxes that went astray and too 3 or 4 days to arrive. I do not drip acclimate, I mostly plop and drop. I do not bother about lighting, the first thing I do is inspect the condition of the fish in the bag under sufficient light to know what is in the bag and what condition it is in.
I do temperature match to some extent and often do a limited acclimation in a bucket when enough fish are involved. Its easier to pour 30 fish out of bags into a bucket and deal with them all at once than having to mess about with 3 or 4 bags individually.
While many sw keepers will swear by drip acclimation, most large scale fw fish importers will tell you drop acclimating kills more fish than plopping or dropping. This all had to do with conditions in the bag as well as how healthy the fish are when bagged. They will tell you that simply opening the bag which premits gas exchange one again is enough to kill off the fish. This is due to out gassing the co2, letting in the O which quickly raises the pH of the water and that in turn turns not toxic ammonia into toxic ammonia.
Rather than rehash this all over again since I have done it already on other threads on this site, I will leave folks with this piece of advice. The longer the fish have been in the bag, the mot important getting them out fast becomes. If there are dead fish in the bag, the even more important it becomes to get them rest into new clean water. Everybody can make their own decision how they want to acclimate, but it is a mistake to think drip acclimation is the only way or even the best way in all circumstances.
