How to know what to charge?

Hi-

I hope this isn't a silly question, but I've searched and searched, looked a many a website and I still can't figure out how price my leopard geckos reasonably. I think I have nice babies, with wonderful looking parents, but then they are my babies and I love them. I don't want to price too high, but yet I don't want to just give them away either. I've seen leopard geckos anywhere from $15 to $800 and up. Now I KNOW mine aren't worth $800.
But, I feel they are worth more than $15-$20.

How does everyone go about pricing their stock? Also, I assume you can charge more for experience and the longer that I breed, the more I can charge, correct? And is it a better idea to wait until they are a little older and more of their true color is showing to sell? If so, how old would you suggest waiting till? Thanks in advance for any help.

Do you know what your geckos cost you? (time, energy and food costs). That's a good place to start.

Market timing. With the above costs figured out you can then evaluate if it's worth it to hold for a more mature coloring (if it costs you $15 to feed them for 3 months and you only get $5 more for the better coloring as an example).

While part of pricing is looking at your competitors to get a rough idea of market conditions, a lot of pricing (especially with animals) is making sure you get what you feel you deserve. This is especially true if your doing it on a part-time/hobby level. It should be rewarding (shows are filled with grumpy breeders that are no longer having fun doing what their doing partially because it is a financial drain instead of earning money for new additions to their collections).

In closing there is no "easy" answer. A lot of factors play into the price and those factors are different for every breeder/dealer out there.

Your price depends on a few things.

1. What are your goals, do you want to make a lot of money selling your geckos or just enough to cover expenses.

2. what are you selling? OK we know you have leopard geckos but as you have said they are going from $15.00 to $800.00. We can't help you determine the price if we don't know what you have (morphs etc.)

This reminds me of when I first bought my shop. All the baby leos were wholesaling for about 10 -11 bucks each and were labeled as simply "baby leopard geckos" or "baby normal leopard geckos". The next season, the price had jumped to 15 bucks and every single person had High Yellows for sale, not a normal to be found (well, they were all around but no were advertised as such)

3. How many babies do you have and how long do you want to sit on them.? The more you have and the more you want for them the longer you will have to house and feed and spend money on them. Selling them a bit cheaper may move them out faster and net you more money in the long run.

I had a guy call me the other day wanting to sell me some guppies ( I had bought from him before but he told me he was quitting so I went elsewhere) Now he calls me up and wants me to buy again, I wasn't intersted and he starts crying how he has so many he doesn't have room for them and no one is buying them any more. Of course his are the best (see #5) so he still wants premium money for them even though he doesn't know what he will do with all of them.

4. Who do you want to sell to? the end consumer? if so you will get more money but it will take you longer to get rid of them. To a pet shop? They may take more animals but you will make less money per animal. To a wholesaler? even more animals but even less money.

5. why are your geckos worth more than the next guys geckos? I'm not saying they aren't, I am just asking why you think they are. You have to be honest. Every single person I have ever met who has bred even a single animal thinks their babies are the nicest one they have ever seen.

6. What is the market for what you are selling. It goes along with #2. If you have albinos, the current market will help you determine your asking price. If the market for what you are offering varies that much you have to dig deeper and find out why. Some people are just in it for fun and will sell their animals cheaper simply because they enjoy it. Others feel they have to bleed every dollar out of the customer because damn it they paid top dollar for their breeders and they are going to get evey cent back out of them that they possibly can. you have to ask yourself where you fit in on the above scale.

as far as

QUOTE]Also, I assume you can charge more for experience and the longer that I breed, the more I can charge, correct?[/quote]

goes, not neccesarily. Many of the established breeders can get away with charging more for their animals simply because of their reputation but lets face it. I seriously doubt that when it comes right down to it that your (read this as any breeder not you personally) animals are any better than I can find from one of several others, many whom are charging much less. I am not saying that everyone has animals the same quality as yours, only that there are others who do. Simply because you have been doing it longer doesn't make your animals better or worth more. An example

If you produce say 20 geckos this year and sell them for 20.00 each. That doesn't mean that the any babies from the same breeding stock 5 year from now will be worth more simply because you are a more experienced breeder and are now producing 200 babies a year. If your product doesn't change you can't always count on your experience being worth more. Thats not to say that it can't be. If you work hard and build a good reputation you may be able to ask a premium for your animals.

I buy animals for resale in my store and so of course price is a factor with me. Still that doesn't mean I overlook quality. I buy my baby leos from someone with a great reputation on this forum and I get them for a good price. I may be able to get them cheaper elsewhere but I have a comfort level with this person and saving a buck a gecko isn't worth it to me. Having said that, if this guy comes along next year and thinks to himself "gee, I've been doing this for a long time now and I think I will raise my prices because I have more experience." I can tell you this, I wouldn't hesitate to look elsewhere. This guy has great animals, but I don't think he is the only one with great animals.

So, to make it simple. Sell your animals at a price that makes you happy. If you sell a gecko to someone for 50 bucks don't beat yourself up because someone else sold a similar one for 75. If you feel you have to get 75 to be happy and are griping because everyone else is selling them for 50 maybe you shouldn't be breeding geckos.

Steve Schindler
Tropical Oasis

Steve-

Thanks so much for your insight. It was wonderful reading your post. I LOVE my geckos and love breeding them. When each egg hatches it's like Christmas. Hopefully that love does continue. Your questions made me think. No, I'm not doing this to make a LOT of money. Enough to cover expenses and a little extra would be nice. I'm a stay at home Mom and a little extra money would be nice but I'm not the bread winner, my husband is.

I think the babies I have are nice hypo tangerines, but then everyone's oppinion is different as to what hypo means. I'll say the ones I have are reduced patterning, with orange overtones. The parents are also the same. Some of the babies have darker pigment than the other ones. Some babies have very little black pigment at all.

We're going to hang on to our babies for a little bit and see if we can find customers on-line. I have already spoken to a local pet store who has agreed to buy the babies at 6 weeks old for around $12.00 a piece. So, if they don't sell I have somewhere to go. He said he might pay more depending on morph. I believe he will be fair and I will take what he gives me. Again, I'm not looking to make a fortune, I love what I'm doing and would probably do it anyway even if there was NO profit.

Thanks again for all your insight. I really appreciate it.

Were the parents sold as a particular morph? What did they cost? If you bred two $800 morphs together, and the offspring were the same mutation/morph then you can sell your babies for $800. If you were to the pet store and bought two geckos 'cause you like how they look, and paid $15 for them each, and you bred them 'cause you like the feeling of waiting for eggs, then your babies are worth $15. Bottom line, if you have to ask how much your babies are worth, they're probably not worth much. If you bred high-end gecko morphs, then you'd know exactly, to the penny how much they are worth.

I'm going to have to disagree with that post. There are many factors in pricing your off spring other than just the purchase price of the parents.

1. Cost of rearing. To sell something for less than what it costs you to raise it to the time of sale seems pointless (though there are exceptions to this rule).

2. Existing market factors. If you purchased an $800 morph last year because you thought it cool, but so did everyone else then your going to have a hard time getting that price on the open market. Also if there is little of your offering out there you can charge even more. Pricing is all over the place dependent upon location and the market you are delivering to as well.

I agree with you to a certain extent Daniel. But, if you buy a morph for $800 with the expectative to breed it and sell it for a similar value you are probably doomed from the start. By the time you are producing babies your morph is probably half price at best. Look at what happened with the piebalds. If you bought a visual last year you paid maybe $12,000. Today if you sell for 6 K consider yourself lucky. I think you have to view it as if yes, you invested $12,000 and maybe $200 worth of feed and labor, but at the end what counts is how many offspring you can sell at a discounted price compared to the value of the initial breeders. It is very difficult to have capital gains in a market so volatile such as that of snake morphs.

Here's what just happened at the pet store I work at-

Arrogant Clueless Manager- "This guy has some leopard geckos. What's the most you'd pay for them? I think they're worth less than bearded dragons but I'm not sure"

Me- "Don't pay more than $15 for normals, or maybe $20 for morphs. Our customers don't know the difference between pretty and ugly leos, we just want something healthy and we can get healthy leos elswhere for $15"

(The next day) ACM- "Check this out, I talked him down from $30 to $25 for these pretty geckos.

Me- "Well that's more than I wanted to spend, but I guess they are high end. Hope we can sell them"

ACM- "High end? They're not furniture!"

Moral- Call more pet stores . In my area they'd be worth more than $12, and if you're lucky you can get someone clueless to buy them for $25. If you sell them to individuals, you can always get more than you can selling them at a pet store, it just takes longer. That's the trade off.

Originally posted by alvaro
If you bought a visual last year you paid maybe $12,000. Today if you sell for 6 K consider yourself lucky.

I'd consider myself lucky if I had $12k last year to spend on anything.

Of course, I'd be happy to sell the offspring of that 12k boy for even 3k or 4k, if that was the market value, because you're talking about animals that average what, about four to six viable eggs per clutch? A single clutch can easily pay for the male even if you breed him to a het female (or not, depending on how kind the law of averages is with such a small sampl group ) and if you're fortunate enough to have multiple clutches, that male will easily pay for himself in a single season.

Heck, if the bottom fell out of pieds, and they were only going for $1k your first breeding season and then dipped down to $500 the next season, the animals would still have a good chance (barring problems inherent in dealing with livestock in general, like deaths, infertility, unwillingness to breed, whatever) to pay for themselves over the breeding lifetime of the animal.

I think with (some)snakes the return on investment is very good right now. On lizards, it's a lot trickier. With most of the more commonly bred species, your time to sexual maturity is far shorter than with most snakes, so you're looking at a saturated market a lot sooner. I paid about eighty bucks for my albino leo girl, a few years ago. That was the first good price drop (good for me, lol), down from what? (Forgot what they came in at, but it wasn't too cheap for a leo.) Now the albinos are going for forty or less.

The only folks I see who seem to be making a decent living breeding reptiles seem to be either those breeding (very) large quantities (including growing/breeding their own food, and including having the facilities to provide natural light/heat for some species and save electricity), or those breeding higher end stuff that's slow to mature and has smaller clutch sizes (bps) or is tougher to breed.

For a hobbiest breeder with a smaller number of less expensive animals, the main thing to look at is how much it costs to breed the animals and raise them to selling size, and if the market (whether local or internet) will bear the price needed to recoup expesnes. That's just a matter of math. You might end up taking a loss on that end of things, but if you just like hatching out pretty animals, then go for it. Most hobbies cost money. Baby leos are at least a lot less expensive to maintain than baby beardies. =)