
Startup offers high-tech gadget buyback plan - drm237
http://www.insidebayarea.com/business/ci_8162909
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nickb
>One of the standard examples cited by TechForward is a $9 fee for registering
a $300, 8-gigabyte iPod Touch. The promised buybacks -- assuming the device is
judged to be in good condition -- are $130 at three months, $120 at six
months, $90 at one year, $70 at 18 months and $60 at two years.

I'm pretty sure you can get a lot better price on eBay. Sure, you'd have to
deal with possible scammers but the price would be worth it.

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mechanical_fish
I tend to agree with you.

The problem with this business model is that consumer electronics is some of
the easiest stuff to sell on eBay. The units are standardized, so they are
easy to describe to potential customers -- when you eBay an iPod [1], the site
even offers you canned descriptions and photos of iPods to include in your
listing. And, if you keep the original boxes in your basement, consumer
electronics is easy to pack up and ship.

iPods are an extremely liquid asset: I eBayed two of them a couple months
back, and both of them sold within $10 or so of the price that I had predicted
based on earlier sales figures. The trading volume is large, and the market
value well known, so there's really very little risk that, for example, you'll
put the thing online and it won't sell at all.

So paying TechForward amounts to a gamble that their promised buybacks are
miscalculated in my favor. But that's unlikely, partly because they put a lot
more effort into the prediction than I, partly because they presumably build
in a factor of safety, and partly because, if they do guess wrong, they may
well go out of business before I can collect my winnings. Once these guys
declare bankruptcy my $9 is gone forever.

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myoung8
Too many steps in the value chain to make this work...

