Profile pages on MorphMarket are now available to other types of organizations beyond breeders. This includes manufacturers, content creators, expo organizers, industry advocates, and more.

We add this functionality to support our events system. Currently, one can create an organization profile when self-registering for an expo. Orgs who have Basic membership get Enhanced Event Listings which include a link to their profile, among other things.

Here a few examples:

• https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/usark/
• https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/narbc/
• https://www.morphmarket.com/stores/morphmarket/

Useful features so far include contact info, description, video, badges, community posts and events. These pages can also gain followers, which will have more value later this year.

In the future, we'll make it part of our normal onboarding process.

MorphMarket Events gives the herp community a calendar of industry expos and other events with rich vendor listings.

This a tool to be used both before AND during events.

It will help you answer questions like:

• What expos are happening near me?
• Who is vending at this expo?
• Where are they located in this huge room?
• Who can sell me a species that I'm looking for?
• What do the parents of this animal look like?
• And more!

Vendors and Event Organizers, please read our FAQs which explain how you can register.

We talked about MorphMarket NFS quite a lot pre-launch, but we didn't say much about this one. We hope you enjoyed the surprise.

Try it out now!

We've been talking up MorphMarket NFS for the last few months.

"MorphMarket NFS" refers to a collection of services which enable us to go beyond sales and support all animals in the herp industry including breeders, holdbacks, and pets.

No more talk. Today we have delivered the first installment.

MM NFS 1.0 is live, and it includes:

(1) New capabilities to help you manage your WHOLE reptile collection and history

• Three visibility settings for ads: Public, Private and Unlisted
• New animal states: Not For Sale, Loaned and Archived

(2) New Animal Manager to more efficiently Explore, Organize and Update your data

• More powerful Search, Filter & Sort
• Inline and Bulk Editing
• Customizable Interface

(3) Initial Lineage Support

• Sellers can create parent animals in seconds
• Buyers can learn more about animals by viewing their parents
• Not For Sale Animal pages
• Breeder NFS galleries on Seller Pages

(4) Data Dashboard to help you stay on top of your animal data

• Analyze summary stats
• Monitor animal status
• And explore the animals behind the numbers

At MorphMarket, our goal is not just to provide the industry a platform to buy and sell, but software services which support the entire lifecycle of breeding.

Stay tuned — there's a lot more coming!

Watch the demo and tutorial videos below to see how to leverage these features.

MM NFS 1.0 Demo

(1/3) The Animal Manager

(2/3) Lineage & NFS Animals

(3/3) The Dashboard

One thing MorphMarket does for both big and small breeders is to provide them with visibility. For example, because our site is trusted by Google and other Search Engines, our MorphMarket Store Pages get great SEO making them easy for the whole world to find.

However, for some folks we do this TOO well! On occasion, we are told by hobby breeders that they'd prefer their store page (along with the owner's real name) NOT show up in Google search. There are various legitimate reasons for this.

We just added a new feature for you to control this. On your Seller Profile at the very bottom, there is a new section called "Visibility". You can uncheck this box and save, and it will require users to login before they can view your store page.

Please note that it may still take a little time for search engines to remove this page from their indices. If you have any questions, please contact our support team and we'd love to help!

In the process of redesigning all the core pages on our website, we just launched the new store page! We believe this is the professional look that takes our sellers web presence to the next level.

New features include:

• Cleaner, more modern look
• Sidebar to jump to different sections
• Collapsable text areas
• Slider for animals for sale at the bottom with larger images

Sellers, for the best possible logo: - Choose a 500x500 square image - Use a solid not transparent background, such as white or black

As MorphMarket is an international marketplace, we're in the process improving our support for users across the world. The first of these features involves better support for foreign currency. If you don't buy or sell in other countries then these changes will not affect you.

Buyers will now see prices in their preferred currency making them easier to understand. The buyer's preferred currency is set on the User Profile, and we have taken a guess for each buyer based on their region. If you don't want this behavior, you can change this setting to "No Preference", and it will continue to operate like before.

The converted prices are based on foreign exchange rates which are updated nightly. The exact price in the seller's currency is shown on the ad page. Buyers who are sophisticated enough to shop internationally, pay export costs, etc, will not be surprised that sellers require payment in their own currency.

Sellers have already had a currency setting on the seller profile. This value was previously used as a default for new ads. Moving forward, this will be the singular place where a seller specifies the currency for their prices. This simplifies the user interface as we add more and more price-type fields on different pages.

If a seller changes currency in their store-wide settings, it will update all of their current ads to be in that currency. This is an easy way to obtain uniformity across the ads.

In the coming weeks we will be making additional changes, which affect how our site operates across regions, which will make it easier for users to shop internationally.

In case you missed this in our newsletter, we have so many big projects in the works:

• App with Notifications: After a few more improvements, we’ll be publishing the “beta app” which has been in use since last Spring to the Apple & Google Play stores. It will be able to send message notifications directly to you and your buyer’s device.
• Redesign of core pages including ad, store, and index pages to bring a more modern and useful style.
• A new help desk service which will provide better online help articles and FAQs to get answers for you faster and help us respond quicker as well.
• Better support for regions of the world

But there is one more thing...

At MorphMarket, our goal is not just to provide the industry a platform to buy and sell, but software services which support the entire lifecycle of breeding. This includes not just your animals that are For Sale but also those Not For Sale (NFS), including breeders, holdbacks, and pets.

To begin, we are completely overhauling our inventory system with a professional design that you’ll love. This will make it far easier to add and manage your animals. In addition, we're adding a dashboard so you can more easily monitor your data.

Following, we will be adding many new features to help you track, plan, breed, and market your animals and brand. This includes:

• Showcasing not-for-sale breeding animals and holdbacks to the public
• Tracking offspring history, lineage and related stats for your whole collection
• Planning breeding projects based on a data-driven analysis of the industry and your collection
• Notifying subscribers of breeding events and upcoming offspring
• Quickly converting litters and clutches to ads

Informally, we are referring to this collection of services that go beyond sales as “MorphMarket NFS”.

Which of these features are you most excited about?

We've just added attachment support to the Messenger! This is such a crucial feature and the new Messenger really wasn't complete until now.

There are actually two parts to this feature:

1. Messages with attachments that originate from email will now show up in the Messenger. Just click to open them as shown above.
2. You can add attachments in the messenger itself using the paperclip button shown above.

Attachments in email will continue to work just as they did before. For those of you who exclusively use email for communications, we hope you will now consider using the Messenger more often. This will give you access to powerful features such as the "Quick Actions" to decline messages or mark them as already responded to as well as other upcoming features.

Because attachments can sometimes contain sensitive information, we implemented have secured them with Signed URLs. Whenever you click or touch one of the links in your messenger, a special link is generated which can be used to view or download the content in the cloud for 20 minutes. After the link expires, you'd need to use the Messenger again to access the file. 99% of the time you won't need to think about this, but we didn't want anyone to be confused if they tried to view a link after it had expired.

One last note: In the app, there is a bug that occurs when a notification shows up at the top of the screen pushing content off the bottom of the screen, such as the Messenger reply bar. We are working to fix this, but for now, just click "okay" or whatever button is on the notification to clear it and the problem will go away.

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.

We just added not 1, not 3, not 5, but TWELVE NEW top-level categories! All of these were subcategories that we promoted to full category status. For these herps you can now enjoy all the functionality that makes finding amazing animals so easy on MorphMarket, including ads indexed by trait tags, subcategories, store directories, and calculators.

The newly minted categories are:

• Snakes: Sand Boas, Rat Snakes
• Geckos: Gargoyle, Leachianus, Fat-Tailed, Chahoua
• Lizards: Skinks, Monitors, Iguanas
• Amphibians: Axolotls, Tree Frogs, Dart Frogs

Fun facts about the increases:

• New top-level categories: 12, which is +50% (from 25 to 37)
• New subcategories added: 67
• New genes/traits: 370
• New calculators: 12, which is +133% (including 5 calculators for existing categories)

You might wonder, how did we choose these categories? It was data-driven, based on quantity of ads listed. Occasionally, we add new subcategories to group ads which are in the "other" buckets. For instance, during this upgrade we also added several new Other Python subcategories for Pygmy, Scrub, Spotted and Water Pythons. And then, larger subcategories become candidates for promotion to top-level categories as we have done today.

We do not claim that our data is perfect, but we are always updating and improving it and we welcome your feedback. The best place for input is in our community subforum which has a form that you can fill out.

Special thanks to so many who provided input including Kylie Koskan, Doug Kulie, Anthony Vasquez, Macie Lewis, Sharon Kay Strohl, Matt Horton, and many others.

If you have ads in these new categories, you might want to review them to make sure the appropriate traits tags have been added. You can add tags by modifying the ads and updating the traits field with the relevant tags.

We hope you enjoy these changes. We are all about improving our data, design and functionality to be the best online resource for connecting the community of herp lovers. We'd love to know what you think in the comments below.