Prior to trying out what first appears to be an iPhone clone, I have to admit that I am an iPhone user. I think you need to be one to adequately try out the new Blackberry Storm because this is precisely the market that the new Blackberry Storm is going for.

Tens of thousands of previous Blackberry users have flocked to the iPhone since the launch of the 3G iPhone and their recently introduced Enterprise capabilities to rival Blackberry. The Storm is Blackberry’s attempts to stave off Apple’s erosion of these core business customers.

Pros:

It has a lot going for it - battery life twice as long as the iPhone for example. It has GPS as standard, speakers are just as good as the iPhone and as you’d expect comes with the complete business-ready back-end Blackberry infrastructure.

Cons:

The click screen is ghastly!! I don’t care if the reviewers at PhoneScoop or CNET tell me that it just “takes a bit of getting used to”. A clear attempt to try and please everyone - and pleasing no one. Why try and re-invent the wheel? And where’s the WiFi?

When it comes to the interface and navigation, changing from the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm is a bit like dumping your beautiful kind and intuitive girlfriend and dating her ugly dense sister instead.

With the iPhone, total intuitiveness comes as standard. This type of ease of use has always been in Apple’s DNA since the Macintosh Performa days.

I had to spend some time tracking through Blackberry’s instructions to accomplish tasks which should have been straight forward but weren’t. And here’s my point: As a business person, I am busy and don’t have time to try and figure out the workings of another gadget. I need it to work and do the job - seamlessly.

The Blackberry has none of the intuitiveness of the iPhone, nor the navigational ease whilst web browsing is plain clunky.

It’s Blackberry saying to die hard Blackberry loyalist “don’t migrate to the iPhone, we’ve got something similar - without addressing the key issues as to why users are migrating to the iPhone in the first place. Plain and Simple : it is better.

Since the launch of the 1st generation iPhone over a year ago Blackberry have had plenty of time to dissect and scrutinize it to come up with something better. Simply speaking the Storm had to be better - people upgrade to better models, they don’t downgrade to a something less - and the Blackberry Storm is quite simply something less.

At trade 2 save we predict many of these will be sold and automatically handed out as corporate phone contacts get renewed. However, I also predict a lot of them are going to wind up being traded in here and upgraded to an iPhone.

I suspect the main reason for picking a Blackberry Storm over the Apple iPhone 3G is going to be network. If your company runs with Verizon it’s highly unlikely that your IT department is going to switch the entire network simply because you find the click clumsy and the navigation a little sluggish.

trade 2 save will buy pre-owned Blackberry Storms along with Apple iPhones and the full range of other consumer electronics games movies and music. By trading in, other customers can buy these goods from us with a warranty in graded conditions, thereby saving money and reducing the impact the consumer electronics industry has on the environment.

It’s hard to explain in simple terms why Circuit City whimpered quietly into bankruptcy this month, but the root causes go back more than 2 decades. Circuit City appears to have continued with a faltering strategy which major competitors like Best Buy did well to avoid.

Once upon a time, you either bought your electronics, cellphones, games and movies from a retail outlet or on rare occasions through a Direct Mail catalog for a value price.

Then came the internet, with wildly overconfident expectations at first, followed by the bubble bursting, and then a more progressive sea change to sold sales, transforming websites like Amazon from loss leaders into major empires of corporate success.

Sometimes the obvious has to be stated in even more obvious terms. You are Circuit City in the 1980s, and you base your concept upon being able to offer less than retail prices by locating your mega stores in less than convenient places - away from high traffic Mall locations. In the 80s and 90s Circuit City’s strategy worked great - customers did travel those few extra miles, and as the gravy rolled in they quickly expanded the model throughout the US.

However, as consumer purchasing trends changed, so too should have the strategy behind their now 700 outlets and 20,000 employees. Staying still with the same 80s model proved to be both short sited and suicidal.

Their inability to solve fundamentals such as basic inventory management was another nail in a slowly descending coffin. Had the recession not hit them so hard, Circuit City may have gone on for a few more painful  years. If they had possessed a management team less motivated by short term cost cutting, Circuit City may have made the fundamental restructuring necessary to compete with the likes of Amazon and New Egg.

   New Egg is everything that Circuit City should have been in an era of rapidly growing internet electronics sales.

With about 200 employees operating from two 300,000 square foot warehouses on the outskirts of L.A and N.J, New Egg is about as lean as an egg white.

Contrast this with Circuit City’s blubber of 20,000 employees and 700 stores (that’s about 14 million square feet of retail priced real estate) - who do you think is going to be more competitive as more and more customers turned to the convenience of the internet.

As profits began to fail, instead of turning on the key problems of a changing environment, CEO Philip Schoonover decided to turn on his staff instead, replacing key sales staff with cheaper workers. Cutting staff whilst keeping with their traditional strategy also helped to cut customer loyalty.

While New Egg developed their internet site and used offshore programming and database centers in China (Where the very top programmers work for under $5 an hour instead of the average $50 enjoyed in Silicone Valley), Circuit City’s own investment into a more cutting edge e-commerce solution was put aside in favor of a $7 million compensation package to the CEO for his short term cost saving.

When a CEO is awarded options of which the value is directly influenced by short term swings in stock prices, it is hardly surprising that Philip Schoonover and his executives avoided any prickly measures which might damage the value of those stock options.

With hindsight, long term positive measures would have included slashing the 700 stores to perhaps 200 in primer locations alongside rival Best Buy, now the undisputed No.1 electronics retailer. Another positive measure would have been to reinvest Philip Schoonover’s $7M stock options award into a e commerce site which Customers could gravitate to.

Perhaps the most crucial would have been to invest in a state of the art warehouse comparable to Amazon or New Egg, whose low costs enable them to beat their high street competitor. Used as a hub, their crippling inventory management issues would have been solved in an instant.

By ignoring the internet, retailers who rely on offering cheaper prices by locating in secondary tier retail locations are shooting themselves in both feet: On the one hand they lack the convenience of primary tier high street competitors, whilst on the other they cannot hope to compete with internet based giants like Amazon and New Egg, who carve an ever growing market share out of their demise.

In our quest to enable more consumers to trade in their pre-owned goods to save money and help the environment, we are keen give credit (where credit is due) to big companies who help encourage it too.

Sadly though, some for them are doing everything but openly discourage the market. On the one hand they offer a convenience service, but give a terrible trade in price with the other. We previously put the spotlight on Sony’s trade and save program which offers the same service:

The beauty of the service is that you can trade in your used electronics in the same transaction as buying that 52″  LCD TV you’ve dreamed of. In the wake of our harsh economic climate it’s also an ideal way for Best Buy or Sony to turn that dream into a solid sale.

But in reality customers aren’t saving any money at all. Quite from it they are being openly ripped off at a time when consumers can ill afford to be.

Like Gazelle, who operate independently from big name retailers, Best Buy provides a convenient user interface to achieve a fast trade in price. By checking on boxes like ‘Yes it has a power cord’ ‘ yes, it powers on ok’ and ‘excellent condition’, a customer can have a trade-in price estimated within a few seconds - all be it a very bad trade-in estimate.

A customer who is tech savvy enough to take advantage of the Best Buy or Sony Trade in program, shouldn’t have too much trouble in checking out comparable trade in prices on eBay, Amazon or even Craigslist.

Some automated trade in responses were nonsensical, however the example below is a fair example of the kind of mark up they expect from customers.

The gravy days of pre-owned resellers is no more as countless buy sell trade outfits count their losses in the wake of the nation’s tightening recession.

Once upon a time customers were happy to walk into a GameStop and accept a couple of bucks for a quick trade in. Not any more.

Recession hit customers are now paying closer attention to the true value of their trade-ins, and seeking local buyers on Craigslist who’ll pay much more.

Outfits like GameStop, who earn more of their revenue from pre-owned trade-ins than anything else, have seen their pre-owned markets deteriorate as more customers move away. One store manager in Palo Alto said “It’s hard to tell a local customers who needs to sell his games collection that we can offer him 30 bucks when he could sell them the same day on Craigslist for over $100…

“Cutting margins hasn’t really helped. Buyers on Craigslist are willing to pay much more than we can… when customers had money in their pockets, they wouldn’t think twice about trading in 5 games for a new one. Now they need the money and are prepared to look elsewhere for a better offer…” Located primarily in trouble hit suburban Malls, GameStop’s suffering is exacerbated as customers choose the internet over a costly car journey. Enticements such as no tax & free shipping make Spun, Secondspin & soon to be launched trade 2 save, more appealing than ever for customers wanting to get a fair trade for their stuff.

Traditionally, buy sell trade stores have done well in times of recession, however, with store overheads and staffing costs, stores need to make a significant margin of between 50-90% on trade-ins.

Online retailers like SecondSpin and Spun offer the same trade-in service online, but with margins of 50% or more for even the very latest games, they still don’t come close to competing with the direct selling power customers have on Craigslist.

“In a tightening market, pre-owned resellers are going to have to slash their margins or go out of business” says Denis Ramirez, CTO at trade 2 save “… but it’s easier said than done… with stores to run and staff to pay there’s just no tangible way to compete… they’re losing their market the same way Blockbusters lost out to Netflix… only specialist online retailers [with no store overheads]… will attract customers by paying more for trade-ins”

Trade 2 save (www.trade2save.com) - launching at the end of the year - will buy and sell games, movies, computing, electronics and music online only. With no store overhead, trade 2 save will offer customers up to 80% of the resale value of their trade-ins. Combining this with conveniences like free shipping and a warranty is the only way buy sell trade merchants can hope to compete in a new economic environment.

It’s taken a long time, and it’s still going to be a couple of months more possibly, but we are working night and day to get trade 2 save up and running.

It’s been difficult creating a bying and selling website with the level of sophistication as New Egg or Amazon without a team of 20 developers and a multi-million dollar budget. Our small team have big ideas though, and when finally launched, trade2save will stand out among other website where people go to buy or sell  pre-owned products, including console games, computer hardware, cellphones, movies and music.

So what’s the site going to look like?

This 60 second trade2save launch video gives a sneak preview on the look and feel of the site along with a quick scan over the functionality. One unique feature of the site is that you’ll be able to buy and sell products in the same transaction. This is because trade2save will buy directly off of you for cash or higher value store credit.

trade2save is the first trading portal where you can either (1) sell instantly to trade2save or (2) add your product with your asking price to the product page.

trade2save charges no listing fees, no transaction fees and no variable closing fees . Trade2save will charge 6% commission on computer products and 12% commission on anything else.

Small Sellers have to pay up to 50% commission to sell on Amazon

Structuring the commission in this way makes it very cost effective for customers to sell one off items like a DVD movie or a cellphone. For example, sell a $5 dvd movie on trade2save to another customer and you’ll receive $4.40.

Sell it on Amazon for example and you’ll receive $2.46. That’s because Amazon and other portals charge a minimum transaction fee as well as as a variable closing cost (on top of the commission).

Small everyday sellers don’t get a good deal and are squeezed out in favor of the more profitable power sellers and merchants who provide ongoing business.

trade 2 save levels the playing field for small one time sellers. Whether your a Power seller or a small seller, you’ll be able to sell (and Buy) knowing that you’re getting a good deal and that there isn’t a middle man double dipping.

If you’d like to become a beta trader on the trade2save website, please let us know. What this will involve is buying products from us and selling products to us in the same transaction. We won’t be charging you and we will give you store credit as a thank you to use when we launch. This is so that we can iron out any problems with the site before we officially launch.

We’ll keep you posted on developments. For now it’s back to programming!!!!!! Doh!