by J.D.G.

Created on: March 08, 2010

* Website review: AbundaTrade.com

* PROS: Great online calculator gives you a rough estimate instantly; great way to keep entertainment media out of the landfills; no need to store items that you are attempting to sell (like you would do with Amazon or eBay); fair trade value, easy process; a wide variety of payment options (PayPal, paper check, electronics, gift cards, etc.).

* CONS: No way to select the condition of your item through the calculator (making it difficult to gauge the actual, final value); you pay to ship your items to AbundaTrade; took a little longer than expected to receive my final valuation.

* MY EXPERIENCE: Recently I decided to spend a Saturday cleaning out the garage, attic, basement, and every other area of my home that has a way of accumulating junk. After separating the "treasures" into donate, trash, and sell piles, I realized that I had a pretty hefty collection of unused entertainment media.

Books I no longer read, CDs that I no longer listen to, and movies that I don't watch made up a large percentage of the "sell" pile. The problem was, most of these things would only garner a few cents on Amazon or eBay, and a lot of the books were too heavy to make shipping them through PaperbackSwap feasible. I also wanted to sell as much as I could without having to store the inventory in my garage (after all, the point of this was to make a few extra dollars and de-clutter at the same time). Add to that the fact that about 80% of the movies were on VHS, and you can see how difficult it was to find a single place to sell my goods.

Then, after some web searching, I stumbled across AbundaTrade; a place that boasted top dollar pay rates for items, a love for recycling, and a passion keeping "stuff" out of landfills. AbundaTrade will take practically every type of media, from CDs to VHS tapes, so it is easy to sell all of your unused stuff in a single location. It is important to note, though, that only CDs with liner notes will be accepted, so if you have some loose CDs laying around, you may want to list them on SwapaCD.com instead.

Selling to AbundaTrade is simple. Once you gather all of your books, music, and movies together, you simply input the ISBNs/UPCs into AbundaTrade's online calculator, and you will instantly get an idea of what dollar amount your items will fetch. This amount is dependent upon the current going rate of the item, and can vary depending upon the condition of the item.

Keep in mind that even though you may receive an estimate of $5 for a book, if that book is received and graded as "good," you may be paid a slightly lower rate. A lot of my items fell into the "very good" condition category, but a few of them were also graded as "like new" and "good." This affected the overall value that I eventually received, but it was only about $7.30 less than I had expected for the entire collection.

When all was said and done, I managed to trade almost the entire sell pile of books, movies, and music for about $150 (minus about $9 for shipping the items, USPS Media Mail, to AbundaTrade). Not bad considering it was all stuff that I didn't even know that I had! Even more exciting was the fact that about 25 of the movies were old VHS copies that managed to snag roughly $2 each, on average. Not a huge amount per VHS tape, but still much better than the cents I would have received elsewhere.

Overall, trading my old items through AbundaTrade was a positive experience that fetched me some extra cash, de-cluttered my living spaces, and helped me do my small part for the environment. I will definitely use them again the next time I do some spring cleaning.

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