MorphMarket News

Have you ever wondered how MorphMarket moderates our site and mediates disputes? And how does our effort stack up against other services? This is something we care deeply about and put many hours into every week.

To increase transparency, we've just published an article on our Market Moderation Policies which gives a brief but thorough overview. It describes our handling and resolution of a wide variety of issues involving users, ads, ratings, transactions, and more. It explains what we do and what we do not do. We believe this information is helpful for understanding your rights and obligations on our site.

This article is part of our growing set of resources in our Learning Center.

Last weekend at NARBC Schaumburg was a great investment of our time. We got to meet many folks face-to-face who live in a different part of the country from our usual stomping grounds (pictured here with boa breeder John Chausmer).

In addition to helping at our booth, I did my best to make it around to all of our sellers who were there. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions and provide feedback and input on our business. You help me understand how you use our site, how do you benefit from it, what is frustrating, what's important, and what we need to do next. I came away with 13 pages of notes from probably more than a hundred conversations. We have some super exciting projects that we are working on, and I am even more excited now.

I look forward to meeting more of you this year at expos in other parts of the country, and of course in Tinley Park in October.

We are proud to announce the new MorphMarket Messenger. This is a major upgrade to our on-site messaging interface, which includes the following benefits:

• The ability to archive messages to keep your inbox clean and organized (use the "archive all" under ... to get a fresh start)
• More powerful filtering options, such the ability to view only messages TO or FROM you
• Faster and more mobile friendly interface
• Scroll down to load more messages - no more pagination
• Better use of Desktop space, showing both panes at once (with a 3rd User Profile pane coming to quickly see information about the other party)
• More intuitive timestamps

For mobile devices on the message list page:

• Swipe down to refresh
• Swipe up to load more conversations
• Swipe right to archive messages

While the system still supports emailing, our goal is to continue improving the messenger until it becomes the preferred interface of communication among our users for multiple reasons. First, the messenger is more reliable than email because we cannot ultimately control where email messages end up. Second, the on-site messenger allows us to add features to enhance your productivity which we cannot provide in email format. An example would be the Quick Reply actions currently available to sellers.

We realize that a critical feature needed to make the messenger more useful is support for attachments such as images and videos. We plan to add this later this year.

NOTE: We are aware of a bug preventing scrolling down for older iPhones and are working to fix it now. You access the Old Messenger using the option under (...) in the meantime. If you are experiencing another problem, please contact support to let us know.

Please let us know if you have any problems or have questions.

This video is an hour of tips and tricks for MorphMarket sellers from owner John Lehmann, recorded with Chris Eaton of the Snakes and the Fatman podcast. This is Episode 4 in a series that Chris is doing with experts across the industry.

The latest newsletter is available.

Also note that we have restocked shop.morphmarket.com and added new items as well.

For the first time in four years, we are adjusting the price and structure of our membership plans:

• The new Basic and Standard plans will see a modest price increase of 8-10%.
• The new Standard and Premium plans will have inventory limits of $30k and $100k.
• A new Pro membership plan is being introduced with unlimited ads for the top 1% of our largest sellers.

These changes will affect members only once they renew into the new plans. Additionally:

• Subscription limitations will now apply to all categories in the North American region except those introduced last year.

Continue reading to learn more about why we are making these changes, how members will be transitioned, and what else is coming to MorphMarket!

Many legitimate reptile breeders accounts have been frozen by PayPal in the last month. This is allegedly due to complaints from PayPal corporate regarding higher than average fraud rates in this sector. We are continuing to monitor this situation.

While we are not discouraging the use of PayPal at this time, if you are a breeder you may want to perform more frequent withdrawals of your balance to a non-linked account in the event that your account becomes frozen.

For MorphMarket subscription payments, we will continue to accept PayPal on our website. If any users need to make payments for annual plans with another method, as in the past you may contact our support team, and we will invoice you with Square. In the next month or two we plan to add alternative subscription payment options onto the site for greater convenience.

While we recognize that PayPal has traditionally offered great buyer protection, other payment methods such as credit cards provide good protection as well. Due to the recent events, some reputable breeders may not be accepting PayPal, but this is not a reason in itself to distrust them. As always we recommend that you do your own research on any seller: read reviews on MorphMarket and consult others that you trust.

At MorphMarket we pride ourselves in offering the best online platform both for buyers and sellers. If you have any concerns about making a payment or suspect someone is not being a responsible seller, please contact our support team.

In the coming months we will be investigating the best payment methods for animal transactions for the reptile community, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Brian Carter, Shawn Gray, and others for their input.

Here at MorphMarket, we’re always striving to make sure all our users, buyers and sellers alike, are honest in their business dealings. We’re also keenly aware that a person’s overall ethics and morals regarding animal husbandry and conservation play a critical role in our community. It is our responsibility to take care of the animals we bring into our homes, as well as respect and care for the natural environment around us. Doing so is not only critical to the animals and the environment, but also in protecting our rights to continue keeping them.

Because this is so important, we’ve composed two articles: a document expressing our position on these issues, and also a code of ethics which we will soon require all our users to agree to. It is on each of us, as individuals and as a community, to work together to protect the animals we love, and our rights to keep them.

If you are a seller with more than a few ads, you should consider using the Bulk Import feature rather than managing ads individually. To import, upload a Price List and to MorphMarket which can create or update hundreds of ads in seconds. This is the approach used by hundreds of the biggest sellers on MorphMarket.

MorphMarket is excited to announce Import 2.0 which improves on the original format in several ways. For example:

• It adds support for almost every field on an ad page -- including animal description
• It accepts a list of animal traits to override the traits automatically extracted from the ad title
• It allows you to manage multiple species at once

Import 1.0 will eventually be phased out, but we will continue to support it for at least the next few months. Read more about Importing in general and Import 2 specifically in the Seller's Guide.

We are excited to announce the MorphMarket App. This app is a Progressive Web App (PWA) which adds enhanced navigational features to the website for a better mobile experience for mobile phone users.

Watch this video for a tour: