We have added two new features to improve the convenience of managing your MorphMarket membership.

First, you can now pay on the site using credit or debit card in addition to PayPal. With the recent issues with PayPal, we knew it was critical to provide this flexibility. If you already have a PayPal account connected you can change this by using the "Disconnect" button, and then you can reconnect with the card of your choice. (Previously, we did accept cards but it required contacting us, etc).

Second, we added a new feature called "Renew Now" for triggering same-level membership renewals to happen immediately. This effectively allows you to pay in advance, without having turning on auto-renewal. This works in the same way as a membership upgrade, which prorates the new membership with any remaining time on the previous one. You will see this checkbox option if you are renewing at the same level as before.

All of this can be found on your Membership Page which you can access via the menu.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if we can help in any way!

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.

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!

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:

Three years ago, we created the Founding Member badge. This was a gift to all the sellers who began supporting us with membership in 2017 and have continued that support to the present time.

Since then, many other sellers have supported MorphMarket with membership even if they were not with us at the very beginning. This led to the idea of creating additional badges for sustained membership. Beyond that, we could think of other achievements to be recognized, such as receiving positive ratings, gaining followers, and getting likes on ads.

To accomplish this, we've just released a new feature called Store Badges. This feature is part of the Basic membership plan. If you are a member the badges will show up on your Seller Profile. If you are not a member but become one, whatever badges you have already earned will begin displaying right away.

Badges are organized into badge groups. Currently we have over two dozen badges in five different groups. When the profile loads, a summary of the badges displays only the top badges per group. By clicking the "View All" button, one can see the full set of badges you have earned.

You can also click on a badge to see an explanation of exactly what the badge means and how it's obtained. For example, the new Annual Membership badges are earned by sellers for each year when they maintained membership for at least half of the year. This means even monthly members can get the Annual Membership badge.

The image above shows the badges shown on Dave Palumbo's profile.

With this system in place, we have many more plans:

• The ability to search for stores by badges
• More seller badges
• Badges for users

What badges do you think we should add?

We just ramped up the number of social media fields that sellers can display on their profile. Previously, we had two slots: home page and facebook. Now we've added 3 new fields: instagram, youtube and twitter.

If you previously had used one of these social media sites as your home page, we've moved that into the appropriate field. That includes 486 sellers using instagram, 343 with facebook, and 46 with youtube. Interestingly no one used Twitter as their home page.

All sellers should go and update their profile with these additional fields now to give buyers the full picture of their presence.

This covers the vast majority of the links used by sellers. If you have a presence on some other website that isn't one of the above, you are still free to use this as your home link.

At MorphMarket it's our job to make it as easy as possible for reptile, amphibian and invertebrate breeders and keepers to connect. And with 4,000 breeders and 50,000 animals from across the world in our marketplace, there's a lot to search through!

We recently rolled out a big upgrade to our search capability. Previously the search box gave no feedback as you typed into it. The new version has several benefits:

• It automatically completes your search so that you don't have to type as much and are less likely to typo. It also helps you discover what's on the site.
• It suggests several kinds of searches over the Ads. You can search for ads by Title, Category or Trait.
• You can search for Stores and not just Ads. You can search all the stores in a Category or even jump straight to a store page by Store Name or Owner Name. This option only displays if there are 3 or less matches. Stores included in this search are the same ones included in the Seller Directory, which requires active ads and/or membership.

It's worth noting that context matters. If you're already in a subcategory, suggested options will be limited to those applicable to that section. This helps to narrow down the overwhelming number of matches across all areas of the site.

The advanced search filters are still available, of course, which you can utilize instead of or subsequent to one of the searches above.

We just sent out our end of 2020 newsletter which contains the Store Policy update (that we blogged about a few weeks ago) as well as a summary of other updates.

Read the Newsletter Here.

In 2020, over 6,400 sellers listed ads on MorphMarket. We love what we do. Thank you for supporting us as we support the herp community!

We hope you able to enjoy your time (in some capacity) with your loved ones.

We've added a new Message Count Notification feature to help alert you to new messages. There are actually two counts, and they will show up in the upper right corner over the message envelope button.

• Green Number: Unseen message count
• Yellow Number: Needs reply count

When you visit your messages page (or oftentimes when you open your emails), it will register your messages as having been seen. This will make the green count go down (or disappear entirely).

If you're a seller and you have an inquiry, it will be tagged as "needs reply" until you reply with a message OR use a quick reply action to decline it, mark it as sold, etc. To help you locate those messages you can use the "needs reply" filter on the messages page. None of this is new. Responding to these makes the yellow count go down (or disappear entirely).

In both cases, the new message counts shown on the button may be lower than the actual number of new or needs reply messages in your inbox. That's because these counts will only analyze the last few months.

We hope you like this messages system upgrade. Our goal is to make your interactions fast and frictionless. Stay tuned for many more improvements to our messages system!