How to Start and Run a Puppy Waiting List

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to run and set up a puppy waiting list. So let’s talk a bit about that today. It might be something you’re interested in as well, right?

First of all, why bother having a waiting list at all?

I know a lot of breeders don’t bother doing it. They’d rather sell on the fly, but I also know that a lot of breeders worry a lot about whether they should even breed or not because they don’t have a wait list. For example, if you’ve got more than just a couple of dogs, you would know that it’s really, really common for two or three of them, even if they only got three or four, that two or three of them will come on heat at the very same time, and then you’re thinking, oh, I should hold back on breeding one or two of them because, hey, I don’t have owners lined up waiting for these pups and I’m not sure that at the time that I come to sell all these litters, if I do go ahead, that I’ll actually be able to sell them all by the time they’re ready to leave me.

So it causes a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights for breeders not to have a waiting list and yet, a lot of you don’t have it. So it’s no big mystery – let me give you some tips on how to set up and run a waiting list.

What if I don’t get the puppies they want?

Now, one of the objections that breeders have about having a waiting list is they say, well, what happens if I don’t have what they want within a timeframe? So they might have only two or three dogs and they might go, well, what happens if I don’t have enough puppies in the litter to satisfy people in the next few litters I have, and that’s a really good question.

Now, the way we get over that, though, is that we give people a conservative estimate of what the waiting time is likely to be.

So what I say to people is at the moment, our waiting time is 12 to 13 months. And I say, hey, I estimate the wait time could be 12 or 13 months, could be, but it might be a lot sooner than that. This is just my conservative estimate. So they have an understanding before they join the list of what the wait time is likely to be, and that also covers you just in case a bitch doesn’t get pregnant or she only has a small litter and you know what, even if you don’t cover it, there’s other ways of handling not actually coming up with the pups in the time. So let me talk about those as well.

Handling your Puppy Waiting List deposits

Now, the next thing you need to do is you need to tell people we have a waiting list and there’s a deposit required to join the waiting list.

Make the deposit a big deposit.

I ask for $500 for people to join my waiting list. Now, the thing is about the deposit though is it should be mostly refundable. Okay. So don’t just grab people’s money and say, now I’ve got your money, you’re never going to see it again, because people’s lives change or they might come across a puppy somewhere else. And if you do a good job with your marketing, your waiting list will just keep growing. If you get good at online marketing, like I teach, then your list will just grow, grow, grow.

So what if someone leaves? It doesn’t matter.

Okay. It’s not the end of the world. You can afford to give them back most of their money.

Have a fair deposits policy

So we have a clear policy, a deposits policy, and we make sure people get the chance we urge them to read that before they put their waiting list deposit down.

It basically says, if you change your mind any time before we offer you a puppy or any time at all really, while you’re waiting, you’re entitled to a prompt and pleasantly offered refund of $400. But we keep $100 as an admin fee. And I also send them a copy of my puppy manual to help them with whatever dog they ended up getting. It’s a goodbye, good luck kind of thing, right? No skin off your nose. You’ve just made $100 for doing not very much.

Now, if though, if you don’t have a puppy for them in the timeframe that you’ve told them as your estimate, estimated timeframe, the conservative timeframe you’ve given them, they’re entitled to all of their deposit back, which is fair, right? If you tell them it’s going to be 12 months before their puppy comes along and 12 months later, there’s no puppy being offered to them, then of course, if they want to, they can get all the deposit back.

But you know what? In reality, by the time they’ve waited all that time and it might only be another couple of months until you have another litter and they’ve made it all the way to the top of your list. They’re not going to go and start again somewhere else. It’s never happened. Okay. But at least they know they can, and it seems really fair because it is really fair. So have a really fair pricing policy. Don’t just hang on to their money. It’s not fair.

Keep good records

The next thing to be successful with having a waiting list is to keep good records. So you should have good records of the people who are thinking about putting – or telling you they’re going to put – a deposit down; the ones that actually pay the deposit, what date they paid the deposit, (because the date the deposit is received actually dictates their position on your waiting list. That’s how I do it anyway, right? You can do it however you like, but I think that’s the fairest way to do it.)

So you need to keep a record of that.

You also need to keep a record of which puppies they’ve been offered and when they were offered them. In our puppy waiting list deposit policy we stick to the price originally quoted until they’ve been offered a puppy. And then if they don’t accept the first suitable puppy offered and postpone for any reason the price resets to the current market price at the time, not the price that they actually joined the list at, because that might’ve been two years ago. So that’s how we keep it fair, but you got to keep a record of puppies that have been offered and all that sort of stuff.

Keep the puppy waiting list fair.

Don’t let anybody jump the queue. That’s not fair. I don’t even let breeders in my group jump the queue. They have to pay their $500 and come up through the ranks just like everybody else. We don’t do any backdoor deals and there’s no special treatment for particular people, and that way we keep the list super, super fair. It has to be fair or it just doesn’t work.

Ready to start your puppy waiting list?

So I hope that’s given you some useful information that might give you the courage to actually go out there and start your own puppy waiting list, so you don’t have to lose any sleep at night wondering maybe I should hold back from this breeding because maybe I won’t be able to find enough owners.

But having a list doesn’t work for every breeder.  Find out if a puppy waiting list would work for you here.

And if you want it to work like this screenshot of actual deposits from my account, then watch the FREE Breeder Masterclass.