MorphMarket News

Custom Tags is a new feature for MorphMarket's Animal Manager. These are also known as Labels by some other tools like Gmail.

What are tags for?

• Create tags according to your own needs.
• Group & organize animals in your collection.
• Assign them to one or more animals at once with bulk assignment.
• Filter/Search your animals by tags.
• Tags are private so no one else sees them.

To access tags, click on the "Tag" column in your Animal Manager. It's probably near the far right. If that is not displayed, click the button to change your column preferences. From the tag modal, you can click "manage tags" to see all of the ones you've created and rename or delete them.

We love this feature because it's flexible and can be customized to your own needs and tastes.

How would you use this to organize your collection?

Offspring Groups is a new animal management feature on MorphMarket which enables breeders to track and showcase the lineage of their reptiles' clutches and litters.

As a breeder, this is useful for record keeping year over year. In addition to tracking lineage, it records which females were bred and their productivity. These animals can also be easily converted to listing for sale later.

Offspring Groups are also useful to prospective customers who can see photos and details of an animals parents and siblings. This gallery allows a breeder's experience to speak for itself.

This functionality was previously only available to a handful of elite breeders with custom websites. Now the ability to track and showcase your breeding history is accessible to thousands of breeder across the world at no additional cost.

Check out our Spring Newsletter to get caught up on everything we've been doing for the last 6 weeks and what's planned! Trying to get these out more frequently.

USARK is THE organization which uniquely advocates for our freedom to responsibly keep Reptiles & Amphibians.

At Tinley Park NARBC in February, MorphMarket auctioned off a first of its kind home page advertisement to raise money for our industry. Bob Vu of Bob's Balls donated $6500 because he understands how important USARK is to our hobby and future. For that reason we are featuring his store on our home page for this next month.

Bob is a proud member of USARK. Let his support be an example to all of us! Numbers count. Please become a member today.

Regions allow you to quickly choose the locations for you want to search over. Following last week's update, we have added several new regions bringing the total from three to eight:

• What was previously the "US" region has been properly been renamed to North America because it already included Canada. US & Canada now have their own regions as well. This means users can choose to search over one or both of these areas at the same time.
• The UK now has their own region, and will continue to be included in the Europe region as well. A new European Union region includes most of Europe but not the UK. Brexit and all...
• All Regions allows you to search over the entire world.
• Europe and South Africa regions remain as they were.

We've generated a unique QR Code for your Store Page. You can download your QR code at the bottom of your store profile page (menu -> Seller Profile). This will take someone directly to your page without them having to fumble with URLs or searching.

In case you've been living under a rock, a QR code is a 2-dimensional barcode which users can scan with their phone to take them to a page. They've become especially popular in the post-Covid world for contactless interfaces for things like restaurant menus.

A neat feature about our QR codes is that you can customize where the QR code goes. So far there are two options: It can go to your store page OR directly to your listings.

Where would you use these? Anywhere you want to promote your brand and products.

Some ideas:

• Stickers: imagine your customers slapping these on their tub, incubators or water bottles, and being able to immediately access your animals for sale whenever they are reminded of you. Here's a QR sticker printing service.
• At your expo booth setup, on a banner or just a sheet of paper on the table.
• Shirts, and other merch.

As a bonus we have now provided easy access to high resolution MorphMarket logos in case you want to use these in your materials. We have had users put these on business cards, shirts, expo setups and even vehicle wraps!

We are committed to providing you as a breeder the full range of products and services for your business or hobby.

Geographical Regions on MorphMarket just got more flexible and are about to get even more awesome.

MorphMarket has been an international service since 2017. At that time, we expanded beyond the US to introduce additional regions to support Europe and South Africa. Canada has also tagged along in the US Region, which would have been more properly named the North American region.

You will notice that there is no longer a region setting in the upper left corner of the web browser or the bottom left corner of the app. That's because regions are now just a setting/filter on some pages which allow you to narrow or widen your results when you're browsing the trait indices, ads or stores. In this setting you will also notice a new "All Regions" option, which allows you to browse results across the world.

What's coming:

• Single-country regions for countries within the supported regions (e.g., US, CA, UK, DE)
• A proper North American region
• Support for additional countries
• Fixes for regions on our Events system

Please note that proximity search for ads has already been an option in the advanced search menu and is still supported. This lets you search within a number of miles or kilometers from a given location.

Let us know what region or country you'd like to see support for in the comments below.

MorphMarket Regions are dead, long live Regions!

Bulk import is a capability which allows you to create and manage hundreds of animal entries with very little effort. This is a great way to upload your entire not-for-sale collection to the Animal Manager. You do not need to use import to be an effective MorphMarket user, but for those who want more hands-on control this is a useful feature.

We announced the beta version of Bulk Import 2.0 last May, but since then we have made a number of fixes and added a complimentary Export 2.0. Version 2 is a powerful upgrade from the original that supports:

• More than two dozen fields including description, multiple photos, and status
• Managing animals in different categories at the same time
• Overriding animal traits automatically extracted from the ad title
• Importing large datasets which are processed in the background

Export has also been upgraded to include all of the same fields which Import supports, along with a few extras such as engagement metrics. In fact, for the first time you can now export your Collection, modify some values, and Import it again.

You can still utilize the older Import 1.0 format for a limited time, but you will need to follow the link on the import page to this legacy page. This video and our documentation provide useful information in those transitioning from version 1 to 2.

This is a Public Service Announcement and a reminder to not share SMS reset codes with anyone.

This kind of scam could happen anywhere, but someone has been persistently trying to trick breeders by using the contact information publicly listed on our site.

It goes like this:

• They text you as if they are interested in an animal.
• They tell you a code is being sent to you which you should give to them so that they know YOU are not a scammer.
• What actually is happening is they're trying to do a password reset on some account of yours, such as Instagram, which the scammer has also found. This service is sending YOU the code to make sure you are really trying to reset your password.

Some variants of the text message from the service trying to be reset clearly say "Do not share this with anyone", but we just wanted to help spread the word to avoid anyone getting tricked.

Since the communications are happening via text message and not on our site, there's nothing we can do to block them. We mentioned this in this the April 9 blog, but felt it deserved its own announcement.

In order to avoid this issue, you may wish to remove your phone number from your Store Profile on MorphMarket, your website, or other public sites. We also have an option to hide your name and phone number from users who are not logged in, found at the bottom of your Store Profile options. It is unclear though whether this would be enough to prevent this situation.

On Friday night, the site was down for periods of 5 minutes or so at a time for a total of about 30 minutes. Thankfully due to protections we put in place a few months ago we were able to fight off this attack with minimal impact to our service.

Also, another PSA -- someone has been texting some breeders directly, trying to get them to share the SMS code which Google sends for a password reset. It's a pretty obvious scam. The Google text message even clearly says "Do not share this with anyone", but just want you to be aware. Since it's not on our site, there's nothing we can do about it.

These issues are just par for the course when running a public website which has become well known. It's our joy to serve you!