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!

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.

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.

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!

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 USARK Membership Badges for sellers. These new Store Badges recognize USARK members with 100% authenticity, because our data is synced directly from the USARK database each night.

For our system to recognize your membership, ensure that you have added to your MorphMarket account (under User Settings) the same email address which you used to purchase your USARK membership. This email does not have to be set to your primary, but it does have to be verified.

Membership in the US Association of Reptile Keepers is critical to our industry. USARK fights against powerful lobby groups who want to take away your rights to responsibly keep reptiles and amphibians.

We know that there are people who have quietly supported USARK for many years. This is admirable, but please consider how publicly supporting USARK is even better. These badges are not just about you -- they are about our unity behind USARK. Your display of membership will help raise awareness about the importance of supporting this organization, because others will see that you are supporting. This compounds your contributions.

We also know that many have provided support to USARK in ways other than membership. Please consider that USARK needs not only financial support, but also membership numbers. Numbers reflect the amount of individual support behind USARK in a way that is similar to names on a petition. The groups that we are up against are massive, so we need to make every one of our votes count.

To recognize your contributions, USARK is willing to grant credit for items donated to USARK auctions within the past year towards an annual membership. To apply contact [email protected].

If you do not have a membership and wish to support USARK, please visit usark.org. Bronze memberships are only $40/year.

Badges are updated nightly, so please allow a day for changes to take effect.

In the future, we plan to add User Badges which will include a similar badge to recognize support from Buyers.

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.

Two years ago, we introduced the MorphMarket ratings system. Since then we have gathered approximately 50,000 ratings on buyers and sellers making it one of the most valuable tools in the world of herp commerce.

We will be discontinuing the option for sellers to opt-out of the ratings system. This choice was provided when we launched first launched the system, but we will no longer support it moving forward because we believe it's unhelpful to the kind of transparency we want to promote in the marketplace.

In reality, using this feature has always been a bad look for the seller. It's better to have a few negative ratings with professional responses than to hide them all-together.

In two weeks, we will be removing this setting from all accounts. If you wish to permanently deactivate your account you may do so by contacting support.