Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am considering eventually breeding some of my snakes, but I was wondering how you guys sell the babies. I might keep a few but where is the best place to start out selling them. Do pet stores commonly take babies and do breeders often get stuck with too many young?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I think far too many people just dive into snake breeding without having any foresight into what is going to happen to the offspring they produce.

Yes, breeders do end up with too many babies and no easy way to get rid of them. I know quite a few breeders who have ended up selling baby snakes cheap to owners of coral snakes, etc. as feeders.

First of all, consider how you are going to sell them. You can sell some snakes online by opening a classifieds account here at KS.com, but that costs money up front. Then you have to deal with shipping snakes. That is no easy task. Most carriers don't accept them and most snakes get shipped illegally by unknowing shippers. However, if you ship like this, there is no recourse if the animal doesn't arrive.

Furthermore, you have to incorporate the cost of shipping into the cost of the snake. Few people are interested in buying a $15 cornsnake and paying $25-$50 for shipping it.

One solution is to simply wholesale all your babies to a distributor/dealer. Then you will get about 1/2 or less what you would have gotten selling individually (I have wholesaled cornsnakes for as little as $2 each!).

Another option to sell animals is to attend a herp expo. Here you have to lay down $100-$150 up front for your table (plus food, travel, lodging if it isn't in your home town). Then you could sell all your animals or none. I have had tables at quite a few slow expos where people were just hoping to sell enough stuff to pay for their table and others where people wished they had brought more animals to sell. There are good and bad expos.

You can sell to petstores, if you can find a pet store interested in the animals you have. Some pet stores have policies that only allow them to buy animals from registered dealers and wholesalers. Others will buy baby snakes. But they aren't generally going to want 20 of something. Pet stores also are wary of unusual snakes and they prefer calm, pretty babies.

If you are thinking about breeding, think carefully about what species you want to breed. Some species are easy to sell, others are very hard to sell. You generally want a species that is attractive and cheap enough to sell to some guy on the street, but you don't want something that 2000 other herpers are breeding and trying to dump as well.

The real key is to breed a snake you love keeping and hope you manage to move your babies.

Don't get me wrong. I love breeding snakes, but I don't make a profit doing it (when you factor in time, cost of food, etc) and I only breed species I like.
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Chris Harrison

Thanks your reply helped and answered my questions. I will be sure to look around before i start breeding.