Why we're hard to get listed with
Most people who apply to sell birds here are turned down. That is deliberate, and it is the main thing this site is for.
The problem
Buying a bird almost always means sending money to someone you have never met, for an animal you have not seen, often hundreds of miles away. A listing site that accepts everybody works perfectly well — for whoever is willing to lie. The photographs are easy to take from somewhere else. The cheapest price on the page is usually the one that is not real.
We have been doing this for 23 years. That is long enough to have seen nearly every version of it, and long enough to recognise one quickly.
What we actually do
A person reads every application. Not a filter and not a queue that empties itself — somebody sits and looks at it, and decides.
Breeders approved today verify their identity through Stripe. That means a government ID and a bank account in their own name — not a photograph of a document, which anyone can obtain, but a check against it. Breeders who have been with us for years predate that check, which is exactly why the Identity verified by Stripe badge sits on the profiles of the ones who have been through it. A badge everybody carries would tell you nothing.
And we check a good deal more than that — which we are not going to list here. Anything written on this page is something a person with bad intentions would read and prepare for, so the rest stays off it. Verifying your identity is where an application starts, not where it finishes.
Getting listed is not the end of it
Being approved is not permanent, and this is the part most listing sites have no answer for. Every breeder here collects reviews from the people who dealt with them, and those reviews are not theirs to delete, edit or quietly bury. We read them. They decide who stays.
Reviewers have to state that they dealt with the breeder before we will publish them, and a claim that turns out to be false is grounds for the review to come down. Where the purchase was made through this site we can go further and confirm it ourselves — those carry a Verified buyer mark.
There are more than 6,000 of them going back to 2008. A site that opened last year cannot produce that, and a breeder who has been getting it wrong for years cannot hide from it.
What we don't do
- We don't approve anyone because they are willing to pay.
- We don't remove a bad review because the breeder asked, or because they threatened to leave.
- We don't take a listing down quietly when something goes wrong and leave you to find out on your own.
If you're buying a bird
Look for the Identity verified by Stripe badge, and read the reviews — including the old ones. A breeder with years of them is telling you something no application screening can.
None of this makes a bad outcome impossible, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It makes it a great deal less likely, and it means there is a real person behind the listing with something to lose.
If you breed birds
You are welcome to apply, and we would rather you did. Expect it to take more than verifying who you are, expect a person to read what you wrote, and expect that to take a little time. If you are running a real aviary, none of this is aimed at you — it is aimed at the people who make buyers mistrust you.