"Gazelle Recyclers" Pays "YOU" For Unwanted Digital Electronics!

It's a fact of life digital electronics will eventually break or get replaced. But it's hard to know just what to do with the gadgets that get left behind. Some people stuff them in junk drawers. Others want to donate or recycle their old electronics, but worry about compromising private data. And plenty of people want some monetary compensation.

The good news is that there are a handful of Web sites that make it easy to do this -- and some of them may even pay you for your old products. The bad news is that you'll likely receive only a fraction of what you originally paid, especially if you waited a while to get rid of it.

Some sites, like Gazelle.com and VenJuvo.com, offer cash for your items and/or will recycle products. Another site, TechForward.com, lets people pay a fee to "lock in" a value for how much the site promises to pay for the product in the future. MyBoneYard.com accepts only laptops, desktop PCs, cellphones and flat-panel monitors, and gives Visa gift cards rather than cash.

I was surprised to receive significantly different value offers from Gazelle and VenJuvo when trying to sell the exact same products on each site. In one instance, VenJuvo offered me $30 more than Gazelle for a digital camera; another time, I got $15 more from Gazelle for an old Apple iPod. It's worth the extra step to shop around at more than one of these sites before getting rid of something.

Both ask a few questions about the item, including its condition and whether or not it still has the accessories that originally came with it. Gazelle determines a product's value using retail (think Amazon and eBay) and wholesale channels; VenJuvo uses similar criteria and also looks at competitors' prices.Point being you can cash in on your old electronics and get cash for them.

Take a look at newly released Gazelle, owned by Second Rotation Inc., and check the simple start-to-finish process of selling a gadget and receiving money from the site.

The third-generation iPhone, hitting the shelves of Apple and AT&T stores will come equipped with a faster processor, a digital compass, a video recorder, a three-megapixel camera — and a hefty price tag for many current owners of the iPhone 3G.

That’s because unless you are a new AT&T subscriber or purchased an iPhone 3G before September 2008, the iPhone 3G S can cost as much as $499 for the 32-gigabyte model.

Gazelle, a Boston base company that pays cash for used electronics like cellphones, digital cameras, LCD televisions and laptops, said it has had a surge of customers sending in their iPhones.

“People are trying to avoid the ‘upgrade tax’ that AT&T is forcing some owners to pay,” said Kristina Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the company. “Whenever there’s a technology jump that is substantial, we see similar behavior. But this year, the iPhone has been like nothing we’ve seen before.”

Currently, Gazelle is promising payouts of around $200 for a 16-gigabyte 3G in good condition. (By comparison, eBay sellers seem to be getting $300 to $370 for used iPhones in excellent condition.)

In the last week alone, Gazelle has purchased more than 1,000 units of the iPhone 3G.Ms. Kennedy said that 95 percent of the iPhones acquired by Gazelle are resold through retail channels like Amazon.com and eBay. The rest are usually recycled. On a gross level, the company turns a profit of 5 to 15 percent per unit. Ms. Kennedy said she did not expect high payout rates to last much longer.

“The price in the secondary markets is going to go down and down fast,” Ms. Kennedy said. That’s because Apple decided to drop the price of the eight-gigabyte version of the iPhone to $99. Before Apple made that announcement, the phones were garnering as much as $350 apiece, she said.

Gazelle works similarly to Netflix. After gadget owners fill out a short survey about their devices, the company makes an offer online and sends out a box with prepaid shipping included for mailing.

“We expect to sell three to four times as many iPhones this summer as last year and will have no problem liquidating them,” she said. “It will be a hugely hot product on eBay this summer.”

Stephen Wakeling, a marketing manager at Flipswap, another gadget trade-in Web site, said he is seeing a similar uptick.

“Lots of people are trading in their 3Gs to make up for the lack of an AT&T subsidy,” he said in an e-mail exchange. “We’ve had tons of trades already. We’ve experienced this surge with all of the iPhone launches but it looks like it might even be bigger this time.Earn cash today just by simply selling your digital product back to a recycle.   http://bit.ly/4D2U5u