So we’ve all been there: you have a load of CDs, DVDs, Games & books that you’ve tried to sell elsewhere and had no success. As you might have seen from TV adverts, there’s a new breed of site that’s been born to help….’recycle’ I guess is the best word that which you no longer need.
This was the position I was in. Having already tried pricing with a previous site (then having forgotten my password and being unable to retrieve it!) I started looking around elsewhere. Then I stumbled upon Zapper. Until then I’d never heard of it and thought that maybe it was too good to be true. So did a little searching and of course saw good and bad points, but decided that I’d take the risk with them.
So the idea is that you insert a barcode from your item and then they return either with a price or a notice saying that they can’t accept it because it’s either not popular enough or they have too many. Fair enough. So our list was populated by DVDs, PlayStation 2 & 3 games (there were more games but Amazon was offering us just that little bit more on their trade-in store at the time) and by the end of it, there were 32 items, mostly DVDs coming in at around 30p a time. For arguments sake we’ll say that the 32 items = £14.
Great, so then you go the review stage and ensure that everything is present and correct. And once you’ve seen to that, it’s onto the packing stage. Here is where you choose your postal method, which is completely free by the way. You can either choose to send by Royal Mail or Courier (for me it was City Link). The site recommends that you choose courier if you have more than 30 items. So of course we picked that (sorry Postman Pat!). They give a recommended number of boxes based on your list, so our was 1. Fine. One medium PostPak box took all of them. You enter the box size but you can’t have half sizes so it a round number which I took up to the next full number (so 37.5cm became 38cm etc etc etc). Next you pick your date and they tell you when the next date is if you complete the transaction on the day. Ours was Wednesday (this was the Monday). That’ll do nicely. Then you wait.
Because I’d picked courier as my postal method, I had to wait for Zapper to send me my label that you attach to your box for collection. There’s also a receipt for the courier to sign and date to confirm that they’ve picked it up. So Wednesday came and, at 11.30am the van drove up and whisked my parcel away down south. So far so good. And now it’s just onto the waiting……
Friday
Received two emails. One to say that the ‘goods’ were being checked in and then another to say that the cheque for the £14 had been authorised and should be sent out within 7 days….so close to the end now…..
Thursday 5th July
Cheque has arrived. Was beginning to wonder where it had gone to but it was sent out within seven days. That is, seven days of receiving the parcel (and doesn’t by my calculations include the weekend),
Would I use them again? To be fair, I can’t actually fault them on anything. of course our experience is only on DVDs & Games, but we might be trying our hand at some books soon.
You might get slightly higher prices on other websites for some items but if you’re wanting to shop around, but if you’re wanting to clear a bit of space quickly and don’t have the time to try flogging your items on eBay, I’d recommend them.
