Who Are We?
BirdTrade was launched in May 2007 as a completely free service. The site quickly established itself as the main bird classified site in the United Kingdom with thousands of registered users to date.
Unfortunately this large amount of Internet activity didn't go un-noticed by foreign bird importers looking to prey upon first time bird owners. You have no doubt seen many adverts for incredibly cheap birds throughout the web. Ranging from unweaned chicks to fertile eggs, we won't go into gruesome details of the treatment of these birds (hatched or not).
When we launched in 2007 we had luckily already taken precautions against these scams with a variety of tracking systems on our website. Our team worked tirelessly to maintain a clean and safe environment for our members.
We decided in May 2008 that we would need to introduce a membership scheme. It wasn't only the foreign buyers we should ban. Business owners located in the United Kingdom were using our free service to mail our members to promote their own products. As of June we have been working on our new website which you are currently browsing. Our small club fees will help our team maintain BirdTrade in the manner that it deserves.
Why Use Birdtrade?
Our service benefits bird lovers to buy and sell their feathered ones without being swindled for separate advertisement costs and horrendous hidden phone charges.
With many years of experience with birds ourselves with an Umbrella Cockatoo, Blue and Gold Macaw and several Black Headed Caique parrots sitting with our team as you read this. We have over 10 years combined experience working professionally on the Internet. BirdTrade understands the importance of bird safety with both buyers and sellers in mind. We try to enforce as much protection as we can and above all we care about the birds being bought and sold on our website.
Some advert sites choose to publish your private information in the public domain so any Tom, Dick or Harry could quite easily misuse these details. Whilst it is convenient for kosher buyers, sellers have absolutely no protection at all. Other sites try to assure you that they will protect your privacy information by switching it to an 070 redirect number.... most users don't know that these redirects then become premium rate and buyers are then charged 50p+ a minute to contact the sellers.
Here at BirdTrade, our members are protected by our personal message system. Buyers will send you a PM (personal message) to express their interest in your advert. E-mails are not published on our website to protect you from unwanted mail.
You can choose to communicate with members directly through BirdTrade without revealing your e-mail or contact telephone number. We advise only sharing your telephone number once you feel comfortable with the member you have been exchanging messages with on BirdTrade.co.uk. With this feature in place buyers or sellers can check their messages at anytime from any computer without having direct access to their own private e-mail addresses.
You will be sent notification e-mails if you receive a PM on our website.
Our moderators review each submission and we reserve the right to reject adverts at any time.
Your classifieds receive a higher percentage of prospective buyers. Birdtrade is a high traffic site built for private bird enthusiasts only! No Traders!
Scam ads are not easy to spot if you don't know what you're looking for. Some foreign buyers make up .co.uk e-mail addresses and buy UK phone numbers across the Internet! As you can imagine the checks conducted are both thorough and benefit the quality of adverts and safety on BirdTrade.
We have banned a total of 756 users and have their address details recorded in our database. Collecting large volumes of user data for blacklisting purposes is only part of our daily routine. Web site's happy to publish unweaned chicks, parrot eggs and illegal birds DO NOT bother to do these checks as it's very time-consuming instead they would rather fund the illegal sales.
Whilst we can take no responsibility for the sales conducted on our site we take pride in the precautions we undertake to ensure each advertisement is for legitimate birds across the United Kingdom.
Unfortunately managing the amount of traffic and keeping our hosting service online is a full time job, so we really do need your help to keep us online and to keep providing the top grade service we are so passionate about.
