Every once in a while you come across some sellers on here that are a bit shady. I’m sure they don’t mean to be, slow replies, but it makes you feel sketchy asf when you send someone money and they are hard to get answered out of.
What are the protections, if any, morph market give the buyers?
MorphMarket doesn’t give any protection with your money iirc. If you leave a review stating that the seller has scammed you, and contact support directly with evidence of said scam, they will look into it and if necessary ban the account.
For your specific situation however, I would warn the seller beforehand that you will take it up with MorphMarket if they continue with the poor communication, to at least give them a chance to settle things with you.
In general it’s really up to you to do your due diligence researching the seller, and being cautious when completing a transaction.
With any transaction of course you need to be sure the seller will let you pay via goods and services through PayPal. If they’re not wanting to pay the fee, offer to pay a little extra to cover for it. If they still insist on you paying friends and family, then I’d hard pass on them.
Friends and family is only for, well, friends, and when it comes to buying animals I personally only use it at expos where I know I’m getting what I’m buying or with breeders online I’ve purchased from before and know are legit.
Hope this helps!
How Does MorphMarket Protect Buyers from Fraud?
I’m going to tag @john incase there is any additional things he would like to add.
We’re going to publish some materials soon which give more detail on our role in the process. But the above is accurate… the best we can do is ban a seller. But our involvement in many cases does help to get a refund.
Beside idea is to avoid sketchy sellers and we have more educational docs coming on that too. But use our rating system and other due diligence, and your common sense too.
New sellers are what I worry about but other than that I would go by their ratings.
So doing this for nearly 2 decade what I can tell you is there is no rhyme or reason to tell a good seller or a bad one from communication alone. I Have gotten my best quality rare CB animals from guys who rather not say hello to me as a buyer and have been ripped off by people who been quick to answer any and every question and the other way around. I have a few sources for QUALITY but only one for QUALITY AND RARE and I still have never spoken with him on the phone as he has never taken my call and is slow to answer texts. LMAO we are a funny bunch in this industry
I wouldn’t necessarily be overly concerned about slow responses alone. Very few people do this full time, for most it’s a hobby. If someone works full time, has a family they spend time with, spend time actually taking care of the animals they keep, have other responsibilities and hobbies outside of reptiles, they might not get back to interested parties immediately because time simply does not allow.
I would look to see if they have other social media, if they have an instagram account, is anyone else tagging them with new purchases they have made, how is their facebook page if they have one looking, if they are located near people you know in the hobby, ask them if they know of them, if they’ve been seen at reptile shows etc. There are also feedback/review pages on facebook, you could search their business name and personal name on there and even make a post asking if anyone has dealt with them before. You could also see if they have a youtube channel and see if they have videos of their collection on there.
We are in a pandemic, people in general are working insane hours. If they are slow, there is probably a good reason for it. The seller could be in the medical field.
Interesting mind set imo. If they didn’t reply at all, I’d have issue with that, it’s understood you do have to give some time for customer service. If that happens to be the next day or two when they get time, it is what it is. You’re not paying them hourly to be on call to answer you at a moments notice. There are breeders that consistently go above and beyond in customer service and most of us appreciate that. Doesn’t mean everyone doing this has the capacity to follow suit and just does the best they can.