How do you like the classified changes so far?

I think its ALOT better,you narrowed it down to "the snake" makes it easier to find what im looking for and hope it doesnt change,im on here every day and have a large collection of reptiles and have enjoyed this site over any other site,no drama,no jealousy i mean people fighting over sales like on fauna wich i was a memeber and over a sale of one of my jags one person who i would not deal with just started all kinds of trouble and made lies after lies ,here its very mature and fun and i can trust those i do business with and any info,care,help i come here i love this site and am very pleased with the changes i loo forward to visiting this site daily for reptiles and pictures just everything to do with reptiles with that said i want to thank you for thinking of us the people who come here to find reptiles,learn or chat whatever they come here for you made it all about US and i enjoy it and think your doing a great job i love it here and ALWAYS refer people here and any support i can ever give let me know,thank you ............sincerely Nikko Gambino

I strongly dislike the new classifieds layout. In my mind I would think that sellers would prefer the older style layout simply because it is more likely to garner more hits for their ads.
I'll use myself for example. There have been many times where I have searched a section (particularly venomous) and ran across ads that resulted in me purchasing animals that I wasn't particularly looking for at the time. Now that the classifieds are broken down into such specific categories I find that I simply do not search the ones that do not pertain to the exact species I am currently looking for. The end result is the seller possibly losing a sale because less buyers are likely to see their ad unless they are looking for a specific species.
In addition, I think the classified layout now drastically reduces the exposure that a seller will receive.
Respectfully, Jackie

I love it.

Hi Jackie! I agree the topic you mention is one that we have wrestled with for a long time, and your complaint resonates with me. It's one of the reasons that we held off on it of so long on so many categories, but the advantages finally outweighed the disadvantages. Its' an issue we have had to contend with since the classifieds were just a single category.
Every time we have split categories we have had some that liked it, some that didn't.

What are some of the advantages to the new layout?

Well for one, most advertisers are less likely to see their ads scroll off the front page and less likely to have to repost them every single day to keep them there.

Advertisers have nearly twice as many categories as before they can post in, doubling the number of ads they can post on site. (Turtle and tortoise people went from being able to post 12 ads a day to being able to post 66)
While this isn't a direct benefit to hobbyists, businesses that service a larger segment will see a big direct benefit.

Sponsors can now sponsor a category that is more specific to their product and can do it at half the price as before (except boa & python people)

More categories was our number one request by users and account holders.

Finally it makes browsing the classifieds considerably easier if your using a mobile phone

Our stats have show that since the change we have seen a hard, steady 15% increase in overall user traffic to the site so I suspect that over time everyone's ads will get the same exposure, though it will take a couple weeks for the system to "settle out" and give us some more conclusive data.

In the end I do think the splits will be beneficial to both users and advertisers, they always have been in the past, though we do have some fine tuning left to do on category naming and proper splits. I myself am less than pleased with the naming convention we have for Tortoises and am looking for a more logical split than geography,
but torts needs to be split, it, turtles, and venomous were literally the only remaining categories from the original category split in 1998.

We are also looking for some workable split for both the boa constrictors and ball pythons. And some gecko people have asked for 1 more split for rhacs.

People are saying "this is just a way to sell more sponsorships" and to that I'd say no, granted we may sell more in number but since the price is reduced to half the previous cost, we are predicting a net $0 gain from sponsorships, in fact we have contacted a number of current sponsors to adjust their existing accounts to the new pricing structure and we will probably see a net $ loss from classified sponsorships for this year due to those credits.