If you are raising puppies and selling them online without your own website, you are missing an opportunity to build trust with your customers and set yourself apart from other breeders. If you’re having a hard time selling your puppies on the listing sites a website won’t necessarily be a magic quick fix, but if you are serious about building a good long-term reputation for your kennel that makes your customers want to tell their friends about you, a website is an important tool.
Your online reputation as a breeder is very important. Even without your own website or social media, your name will eventually show up somewhere online. This can be a good thing or a very bad thing, depending on what people write about you. If you have poor breeding practices and do not follow up with customer complaints and resolve them in a friendly and professional way your customers will share those experiences online and your reputation will suffer. If someone wants to know more about you and does a Google search of your business name and you don’t have a website the first thing your potential
customers will see are those negative comments your disgruntled customers left online.
A website doesn’t mean you won’t receive any negative feedback online, however, it does provide a great place for you to show your potential customers all the good feedback you have received from previous customers and provides an opportunity for you to explain why someone should purchase a puppy from you and not any of the other hundreds of breeders they might find on the puppy listing sites. It will also most likely be the first thing a potential customer will see when they search for your
business name on Google. The quicker you can build trust with your potential customers and reduce their fears of being scammed the more likely they are to buy a puppy from you.
The year 2020 changed the lives of many people and it exploded the dog breeding industry. Almost anyone could sell a puppy for a premium price during Covid with very minimal effort. Many people jumped into raising puppies thinking the extra income they could generate was here to stay. Unfortunately, 2023 brought us higher expenses and, for many newer breeders, puppy prices that are at or even below 2019 prices. However, many professional breeders are still selling puppies at what some would still consider “Covid prices”.
Licensed breeders that have invested the money in DNA testing, and hip certification, and have been serious about providing high-quality puppies and an excellent customer experience are often able to sell their puppies for much, much more than “hobby” breeders. As with any other business, this doesn’t happen overnight. It requires effort to build an excellent reputation, provide a consistently great experience and have a way to show that you are serious about what you do online. That’s where a website comes in.
All the top breeders have up-to-date websites. If you’re not sharing with the world that you are the expert in the dog breeds you raise, you’re missing out. Websites that are attractive and up-to-date build trust in your kennel and in you as a breeder. It can also quickly show all the puppies you currently have available and answer questions for the customer like, “Where are you located?” “How old is this puppy?” “Can you deliver?” etc.
Stay tuned for the next article where we’ll learn more about what defines a good website.
