Re: Best place to buy ball python online
Look to see if there's a herp society in your area, and if they'll be having an expo anytime soon. You can get a normal for really cheap at an expo, or, if there isn't an expo soon, ask the members if anyone has a clutch now, or soon.
Re: Best place to buy ball python online
Quote:
Originally Posted by
deja-vu
I looked around morphmarket, and I like the idea of a search engine, but I only found an original ball python that was in Florida. Lots of them were in Florida, and I live on the opposite end of the country. The shipping is way too expensive, and I rather get one closer to home. I will check out kingsnake and fauna.
Many breeders won't even take the time to post an ad for normals they might have. If you want to find some breeders closer to you, check out the MorphMap on MorphMarket. It's a Google-maps powered interface. Then you can directly approach them.
Re: Best place to buy ball python online
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Caspian
I really like MorphMarket, but be warned - many of the breeders that sell on there don't seem to clean up old posts or update. I've also used Kingsnake.com, but again, there are a lot of repeat and old posts that don't get cleaned up, which makes it really difficult to tell what's still available and what isn't. I...
This is a problem that we're aware of and are working to improve. We've tried to create a system where the searching and browsing is so good that you can find what you want without having to always be watching the stream of ads; or for sellers, a system where you don't have to constantly bump the ads to keep it in the view of buyers. But the downside is in the beginning we took no measures to address sellers not updating their ads.
Starting a couple months ago we began removing ads from sellers who weren't logging in after a couple months (after trying to notify them). We also receive feedback from users -- any inquiry gets you a chance to fill out a quick survey, so we get notified about stale ads. Currently we use that info mostly for alerting new inquirers about whether the breeder is responsive or not, but in time we will also use stale ad reports to factor into some kind of rating. We do now notify the inquirer if the seller hasn't logged in for more than a month.
This is a challenge for any classifieds type site, and most don't attempt to deal with it at all (e.g., you just *expect* old Craiglist ads to stale). But we have all the data to monitor the issue and a number of ways to incentivize sellers to update their ads more frequently, both positive and negative. Keeping both sides of the marketplace happy is a delicate balancing act.