Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

When I moved recently I was confronted with the fact that I have apparently been hoarding books, CDs, and DVDs my entire life. While this has afforded me a nice collection of these items, it has made my small NY apartment quite cluttered and made moving about 450 lbs more expensive than it needed to be. Still, I couldn't bear parting with all of my items for that reason alone. Enter Swaptree.

This free site allows you to enter in your inventory of goods as well as things you want and then will match those lists against lists from other users. Creating the lists is easier than you might think - you can use the title, ISBN, or UPC code of the item or you can upload a list of items from a file, Amazon wish list or other lists such as "Best Books of 2007" by Amazon.com or "Best Selling DVDs" from barnesandnoble.com. And for the items that you have, you can enter in status ratings and descriptions so that other users will know what condition the items are in.

Once a potential trade is found (they'll even find three-way trades), you're notified via e-mail and given the opportunity to accept or reject it. If you accept it, you simply ship your item out. Swaptree.com even gives you the option to print a USPS shipping label directly from their site and have it billed to a credit card at the end of the month. Shipping charges have run me anywhere from $2 to $5. If you don't want to deal with the shipping, you can even tell Swaptree.com that you only want to deal with users in your neighborhood and then you can simply handoff items to one another. When the trade is completed, you can provide feedback on the user (very much like eBay) that other users can then read to determine if they want to make future trades with that person.

Chris Patten