From now on we are requiring buyers to complete a few basic fields in their User Profile before sending new inquiries. The basic fields include:

• First and Last Name
• General Location (Country & Postal Code)
• Phone Number

This change will speed up the inquiry process for everyone. Providing this basic information up front saves both the buyer and seller from having to request or provide it in a series of messages.

Phone numbers are now part of the required fields for a few reasons. First, sellers shipping live animals must provide the buyer's phone number to shipper. Second, phone numbers are valuable for in-person pickups. The Messenger will become progressively more real-time in future versions of our app, but it's always good to have backup communication methods.

We recommend that buyers enter accurate information. While there's nothing stopping you from entering "Daffy Duck" as your name, it will be off-putting to sellers, and you can expect to be declined and blocked frequently. If the name in your profile doesn't match the name in your payment information, that will be a red flag to the seller and will likely cause delays.

We also recommend filling out the optional fields. This information will help you build trust with the sellers and they will take you more seriously from the beginning.

In the future, as we add more support for transactions, we may have certain information such as phone number or full address become to the seller once a transaction has begun. Until then, you could enter a fake number -- such as all 1's -- if you are not willing for sellers to see our number. But again, it's the seller's option (just as it always has been) to decline an inquiry.

We are excited to announce a new feature called Buyer History. This allows users the opportunity to "level up" over time as they use the site and make purchases.

Our site has a lot of data about buyers; however, we have chosen not to give this information directly to sellers in raw form due for privacy reasons. Instead, we've combined a number of factors into an algorithm that will give recognition to buyers with history.

Buyer history can be seen along with other user information on the User Profile, within the Messages system, and in the footer of Inquiry emails.

Each level is represented by a different colored star:
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Some clarifications:

• The level is NOT based on ratings from sellers; however, it IS positively impacted through confirmed purchases from breeders through our inquiry system.
• Right now there are only 5 levels. Because there are only a few levels, it is not "easy" to get to level 4 or 5. There are no "bad" levels, but all users can achieve Level 2 in time. We may expand the levels in the future.
• Generally levels will stay at the same value or go up. They will rarely go down.
• An easy thing you can do to help your level is to make sure you've filled out the required fields on your User Profile such as your name. These are "free points" like writing your name on the test. Although, soon this will be required for all users in order to send inquiries, and thus not have an impact on levels.

While Buyer Ratings might have accomplished the same thing, to date sellers have not consistently left ratings for buyers -- but we believe they should still get credit for this activity.

We love ALL our buyers, especially those who are brand new. And most sellers will work with and entertain inquiries from all as well users. However, sometimes sellers may give extra consideration based on history, such when selling a very expensive animal. That's fair, because buyers also take many factors into consideration, such as a seller's ratings, badges, and so forth.

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.

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.

We just added 5 styles of hats: two Flexfits, a Richardson snapback, visor and beanie. And for variety, three different colors on the snapbacks. Add a shirt, mask, gaiter, and/or stickers to put it over $30 for free shipping.

We do not have a huge amount of stock, but we will be learning what you like based on orders and restocking accordingly.

Shop now at https://shop.morphmarket.com/

Auctions are now LIVE in our community forums to raise money to help breeders who were severely affected by the recent cold and outages.

We already have several 24-hour auctions in progress with a lot more to come. Visit the auctions here and place some bids! Current items include:

The Reptile Relief Fund 101 Charity Group was organized on Facebook; however, their first few attempts to setup the auctions there were shut down by Facebook. Thus we are honored to host them in our forums and support the #reptilefamily. Every time $10,000 is raised, it will be disbursed to 20 individuals.

We have prepared some instructions for how this category and auction will work along with some tips on how to use the forums, so read this first. This also explains how you can donate items if you feel moved to help out.

Sometimes you may be disinterested in a particular seller. For example, maybe Justin's animals are just so nice and pretty that you can't stop looking at them, but you need to.

Block Store is a brand new feature to help you out. When you block a store, all of their ads will be excluded from your searches.

To block a store, use the Block Store button on the upper right of their store profile, while you're logged in. To see all stores you've blocked, use the menu to navigate to your Followed (and Blocked) Stores page. There you can easily unblock.

Something to keep in mind is that index pages with ad counts reflect the total number of ads on the site. It's not until after you execute a search that you may see a reduced number due to excluded ads. We put an asterisk on the total result count to remind you of this possibility.

Now you can follow your favorite member stores. To follow a store, use the button on the upper right corner of their store page. This feature will be available for stores who have a MorphMarket membership.

Having followed some stores, you can access the full list of stores you're following from the menu on the Followed Store page. From the Followed Stores page use the button in the upper right corner to access a feed of the newest stuff they have posted.

Coming soon -- a long time and highly requested complimentary feature: Ignore Store. This will exclude stores from any search results.

Ever imagine what kind of combos you could produce with an animal you are looking at? Perhaps you like to use our gene calculators to explore different possibilities.

We've just made that easier by adding a Calculate button to the ad page which drops its traits right into the gene calculator (for applicable species).

It initially crosses the traits with a normal. Just click the righthand box to update the right parent to whatever you choose. Let your imagination run wild!