Selling To Individuals
If you're considering going this route, you will need to determine what advertising source can work for you. It should be something you feel confident about, and if internet, a situation where you are not in violation of some terms of service.
Various people who have bought directly from me have given me these impressions:
- Suspicious of pet-store-supplied animals, thinking them to be sick or lower quality;
- Want to feel like they are getting something more special than just a pet-store thing;
- Some honestly want to see the breeder and know where their new pets come from;
- Some like the guinea pigs I advertised and/or my
outcrossing breeding focus;
- Depending upon the retail sale prices of the pet stores, you may be undercutting the pet stores, and in that case, the buyer may be there because they are seeking a good deal;
- It's possible that the person is mentally ill or a
hoarder, and for some reason are preferring to get animals
from people or places that are off the beaten path.
Where I live, it's possible to get a bit more money for each sale when selling directly to buyers at a price point where you are still undercutting pet store prices. But it can be difficult to move much volume this way.
Getting people to come buy, and accommodating them, has a time-spent trade-off. Time is money, friend!
When buyers come to buy guinea pigs, you need to give them some things with their new guinea pigs.
- Some portion of the pellet food that they are eating at that time (unless they are buying a larger quantity from you or have already purchased this exact food for themselves)
- Printed information about the care requirements of
the species
- Your contact information, with notices that encourage them to contact you in the event of problems or questions
- Contact info could be combined with your return
policy
I don't do many direct sales to the public, but when I was doing more of them, there were parts of it that I found to be positive experiences.
It can be interesting and fulfilling to sell to enthusiastic families who are happy to have new pets, and you are getting to participate in an important and valuable family event with them. The kids and parents are happy to get to see and hold baby guinea pigs, and they hold their own guinea pigs for the first time.
The majority of the times that families come to buy guinea pigs, it's a good, happy affair. The people leave as a happy family with their new furry family members. But there have been occasional, rare visits of weirdness.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
There was a family who came in (2 children), and the father kept getting mobile phone calls, over and over again. They seemed to be business calls and he made a big deal out of them. He would step over by the door, interrupting everything. The mother seemed to be working hard psychologically to not acknowledge the fact that her husband's behavior was destroying what should have been a happy family event.
As I watched him standing over by the door, I knew I was seeing this man who was pedal-to-the-metal arranging for there to be a future single mom with kids and a confused, recently-divorced man who doesn't get it.
He took those calls right through when they were walking out the door with their new guinea pigs.
I think this was the lady who called me back 6 months later, sounding panicked, saying she needed to move to a new apartment immediately and didn't know what to do with her guinea pigs because the new place wouldn't allow them.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It is usual for parents who bring kids all the way out to see a breeder's guinea pigs to have, by that late stage in the process, committed to buying guinea pigs for the family (if not buying mine, at least buying someone's). People don't always take them on the day of their first visit, but they have at least committed to the children to get something.
They don't show up and let the child hold the guinea pig, name it, fall in love with it, and then psychologically torment the child, saying that they themselves are undecided. But this was what one woman appeared to do.
She came with her daughters, and clues quickly surfaced in the kids' behavior that something was off. The girls were unusually clingy with the guinea pigs (there is a difference between clingy and normal kid behavior with them). They wouldn't remove their hands from them and wouldn't move away from their cages. Never seen that before (and never seen it again).
The mother started doing petty-sounding half-refusals to the kids -- again, something I'd never seen a parent in this situation do. And she kept kind-of smiling while doing this. I soon came to understand that I was seeing some kind of strange psychological abuse of the children occurring.
It went on went on for a while, and it was disturbing to watch. This harrowing behavior from their mother could have only been an ongoing source of torment in these children's lives.
When it came time for them to go, they left without guinea pigs, officially at that point still "undecided". At least they did come back like a week later and get them. I try not to let my imagination explore what kinds of interactions regularly go on within that household.
For me, there are two big down sides to selling directly to the public that don't involve normal business concerns such as advertising and seasonal changes in demand.
The first one involves a possible outcome of unknowingly selling to a mentally-ill or neglectful buyer who neglects your babies to death (an outcome which I assume you feel driven to avoid).
To that end, here is a suggested return policy:
|
In my (unfortunate) experience, around 2 months is how long it takes a guinea pig to die (scurvy) if a horrible person feeds them a completely inappropriate diet.
The above return policy is calculated to create the best chance of causing someone who might do this to either: feed them correctly (so no neglect), or if they do neglect the guinea pigs, get the person to contact you when they realize that the guinea pig is sick.
If a potential buyer shows up who you judge to be incompetent or incapacitated, try to notice this quickly and cancel fast. You don't have to confront the person or be truthful, just come up with something and get them gone. Maybe you forgot, and these guinea pigs are already reserved and paid for by someone else, you know?
The more realistic concern unfortunately is the one who looks fine but is actually going screw it up (maybe even has the usual kid in tow, looking like any old buyer).
While they are neglecting their animals, if you ask this kind of person about a guinea pig's condition, I think they are likely to respond with wrong information, saying that it's perfectly fine. You can not follow up with a mentally-ill buyer to ask if a guinea pig is healthy. They could say it's doing great until the moment it starts convulsing or dies.
| You should report
any crazy neglect cases you may encounter to the
local (police/government) animal welfare
authorities. If you don't want to potentially be in that position, don't sell directly to the public (there's nothing wrong with that). |
If you get a phone call or email about 2 months after a sale saying that one of the guinea pigs has died or is sick, this is a very bad sign. If you are getting involved directly (as I absolutely do and hope you would too), you may be rolling out on an attempted rescue mission.
If you do sales directly to the public, there is a greater-than-zero risk of being traumatized due to getting involved in a bad neglect case. Psychological resilience is not necessarily a limitless resource. There is a certain wisdom to making your sale focus be pet stores.
Silver and Tooker
The other down side to selling directly to the public is that by identifying yourself and pinpointing your location to strangers, you give both animal rights extremists and somewhat-radicalized keyboard-warrior people an opportunity to access you, posing as buyers, or in a rare case you could get one buying animals because they think they are somehow rescuing them (I had this happen once).
These concepts should be reviewed:
In some online communities, guinea pig breeders and pet stores that sell small animals are a continual focus of undeserved blame and hatred. Selling directly to the public may make you known to people who have been influenced by these ideologies, and you could be stalked or harassed.
They have been using 2 unrealistic definitions for pet breeders, both serve as terms of attack: animal "mills" (larger businesses) and 'backyard breeders' (small businesses, especially if the breeder lives at the same site as the animals). In my experience its not worth your time trying to tell or show people like this that you aren't the heartless monster they claim you to be. They are reeling in social cliques and echo chambers that target you for hatred, and that's that.
When they become aware of you, it's possible to start experiencing a significant number of contacts from fake buyers who occupy as much of your time as they can get, and then, they will be no-shows, intentionally inconveniencing you and causing schedule conflicts with actual buyers.
Phone calls, emails, feigned interest in sale animals, reservations made which turn into no-shows, disingenuous home visits, and unwarranted welfare complaints to authorities are possibilities, and may be done to you repeatedly.
After you get experience with meeting genuine buyers, you may be able to recognize the fakers (but even then, it won't be until after they've already wasted some of your time).
Darley Oaks guinea pig farm
It's not in your interests to give radicalized people information about your operations. In the event of obviously hateful contact (in email for example), I suggest either not acknowledging their contact, or tell them not to contact you again and block the contact. Remember that these are not customers and you don't owe them anything.
A usual characteristic of the radicalized types is that they will not buy from you (but they may feign interest in order to ask you probing questions and/or visit your establishment). However, for me there was one exception.
One time I advertised a small group of sows for sale as being in their breeding prime. A pair of radicalized young women came fast for those, making a nearly immediate response to the ad (which was unusual in itself). Swoop, in and gone!
These people's distinctive behavior made them recognizable, even when they made a purchase. They stood out essentially because they were bad at acting (and I'd seen plenty of normal buyers by that time).
Someone might make an unwarranted complaint to local animal welfare authorities about you, which necessitates the local government's veterinarian's office needing to waste their time by showing up at your establishment for an inspection. It is possible for these inspectors to have lost their objectivity (too), or have incorrect beliefs about guinea pigs' biology, even if veterinarians. Regardless, since you will not have actual welfare problems, authorities should (hopefully) not be taking (unwarranted) action against you.
I read on the internet about a situation where a complainer lied to animal welfare authorities about a guinea pig breeder, claiming a welfare catastrophe was in progress, with no food or hay available for the guinea pigs. In reality, the complainer had not seen the site. The breeder was low-volume and appeared to have have turned down a sale to this person for reasons that were arbitrary (or discriminatory). But still, the authorities showed up at the site to investigate.
One of my pet store customers has had unwarranted welfare complaints made about them. One trigger for complaints was when a radicalized pet-store-hater comes into their store (no intent to buy), sees the relatively small sizes of pet store cages, and thinks that complaining to the local animal welfare authorities is in order. In reality, the pet store was legally allowed to use small cages because the housing is considered temporary.
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