How do you deal with inexperienced customers that harm the animal, despite your advice on husbandry and when you are providing ongoing support but they think they know best and do different?.
One Example. I sold a 1000g, 1.5 year old male that had lived all its life in a tub and still needed a hide, and had only heated food.
I explained all this but they believed it would be better in a large glass tank, just based on the fact that their only other 7 year old snake had adapted to a glass viv and non heated food before they bought it .
I advised to keep the snake how it was used to initially in a tub, gradually acclimatizing it to new environment, e.g getting it feeding then gradually covering the large glass viv with the following:,
By Checking temperatures where the hide was, adding more hides in different temperature spots covering the glass and removing cover gradually and so on.
They Just put in a huge glass viv with high traffic noise, light changes due to people walking past and lights on and off, straight away without any of my recommendations implemented, and came back months later saying it would not feed .
After a few months of ignoring my advice (about also ignoring my advice about the variability of temperatures and humidity in a large glass tank and position of multiple hides and cover) it got ill and they blamed me for selling a sick snake.
It was and all my snakes were and are sill healthy feed well. Also they came and saw my set up and that animals were healthy and well.
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Sorry to hear thats happened. First and formost i would never sell to them again. Second, i would get a backup of all correspondence and put it in one place. Unfortunately there isnt much you can do about their accusations on the open forum, but im sure there are many breeders who may message to know who it is to avoid giving their animals bad homes. Theyvwill likely leave a negative review which i believe you can appeal (@eaglereptiles not sure what the full proccess is so tagging you).
Im sure some breeders who are actively making sales and dealing with customers will have some better advice, but thats what i would do and would expect were it me.
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Thanks, @verinium. Yes they are banned for future sales based on their lack of being willing to take advice and learn for definite. (even with my 35 years experience of breeding snakes other than ball pythons, I have had to swallow my pride, even in writing here many times and accept i can still be wrong and we all can learn.)
Also I will not identify them on an open forum, that’s not right.
I have never had this problem on MorphMarket so far, only positive responses, it was a different less specialised site. Maybe that was part of the problem.
Its good to know if i do, and keep records i can appeal to ratings though on MorphMarket . I didn’t know that.
I am new to ball pythons and there is much advice on YouTube about advertising anywhere everywhere to be successful. I am beginning to think that is not necessarily the best advice.
ball pythons are more complex for a beginner for example other than many snakes like a corn snake. and many others.
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Thank you for tagging me @verinium and I’m sorry your having to deal with this @ascended .
Please can you fill out this form Barry : https://www.morphmarket.com/incidents/ . It will help us in our investigation as well as create a permanent record in our database.
If the buyer reaches out to MorphMarket Support regarding this then they will also need to fill out this form, so it will be extremely useful to have your side of the story already on hand.
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Thanks for the advice @eaglereptiles I didnt know that was an option. I will do so. that helps.
Following this discussion and thinking more, I am also thinking about a disclaimer for all future sales.
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Many sellers put a caveat in their ToS about how long a buyer has to report a “problem” with a purchased animal.
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I highly recommend going through https://www.morphmarket.com/help/default-policy/ and copying and pasting it into a word document. Go through each point and spend a little moment thinking about what your stance is as a business on each and every point, and edit it to reflect such.
When you are done, paste it into your store policy field.
Any that you don’t directly mention in your policy will be seen as you accepting MorphMarkets default policy for that specific point found in that link.
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@verinium + @eaglereptiles + @t_h_wyman
Thats all fantastic advice. But to be honest I have never had a problem on MorphMarket . Although I haven’t sold much I assume it can happen there too. So I will follow it for MorphMarket just in case.
My example was for a UK pet selling site one better than USA crages list, to which our equivalent would probably be Gumtree or something. I would never go there.
I suspect the knowledge and experience of some keepers on less specialist sites is on average lower and that might have been part of the problem.
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Very likely id imagine. Too many individuals that want the thing, but dont want to hear from anyone that they arent equiped to have it.
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