Is PayPal the best company to sell and buy snakes through?

[XPLSV]

And never pay with friends and family unless you know AND trust the seller.

Ditto on this one. You will lose any type of buyer protection if you send your money this way. I had a transaction just this past year and the guy told me to use that route as it would be cheaper for me as he advertised the price with this in the description (this was for a condo rental). I told me I would pay the extra fees that PayPal would charge him, calculated what they were, and sent my payment that way. He sent me a nasty message that he told me specifically to pay via the family and friends route--this despite the fact that I had paid the extra money. This was the final trigger and I contacted PayPal and reported a fraud and they told me this was a common way for scammers to often get away with the funds.

I want to share one more thing about PayPal. In general, PayPal will side with the Buyer on a dispute. I have seen/been involved with this over the years, but the one that irks me the most happened 19 years ago when I had to sell off my five dozen plus snake collection due to a military move to the DC area. My favorite out of all of these snakes was a pair of Peruvian Redtails (Jeff Ronne) that I had for under two years. I was trying to figure out if I could possibly keep them and they were the last of the lot to go. Had a gal from California contact me about buying them and asked if she could set up a payment plan, as the snakes were a lot of money for her but she really, really wanted them. She divided the payments into four equal payments and made them via her bank account through PayPal. I waited for each of the four payments to clear before shipping her the Peruvians. Once she had them, she contacted PayPal and claimed fraud. She claimed someone had gained access to her PayPal account had made these four, equal payments over a two month period without her knowledge. PayPal immediately sided with her and issued a forced withdrawal from my bank account. I tied contacting this woman from my Florida area code cell phone number and she would never answer her phone. When I obtained my Virginia area code cell number, she answered my call and I must have caught her by surprise, as she simply did not hang up and actually talked to me a bit. Said she had a car accident, was really short of money, didn't know what to do and things just happened. I honestly don't believe all that, but the short of the matter is she ended up with two beautiful snakes and I was out $1200. PayPal told me I had no Seller protection because I accepted multiple payments for an item and that negated any type of protection I might have had for a single item transaction. I did everything I knew of to protect myself in this transaction, but ended up being the victim on this one. Still irks me, nearly twenty years later.

Do everything you can to protect yourself and hopefully you will lessen the chances of a bad outcome. If a person has a good reputation in the Herp world, you're much better off than someone that is unknown. I think Facebook has helped a lot in this regard for small quantity breeders. Helps establish some sort of history for a person that might be viewed as opposed to someone who suddenly pops up on Kingsnake or Morph Market.