Obama’s PR machine continues to fire on all cylinders to reassure a nervous America worried about trillion-dollar deficits stretching as far as the eye can see.

With imports continuing to extend a runaway trade deficit and no serious solutions to reverse the trend, Obama has a mountain to climb and little hope of stemming the crisis.

In an open letter to Timothy Geithner this week, trade2save urged the Administration to provide tax incentives to retailers offering to buy and sell used products to consumers.

Chris Whittome at trade2save writes “The amount of products coming into the U.S compared to exports is staggering.  Any attempts at cost cutting or reducing government spending pales to insignificance if we can’t get the trade deficit under control.”

Encouraging pre-owned could reverse a worrying trend

The argument put forward by trade2save is simplistic, but none the less compelling - “too many products come into the country compared to what goes out. If what came in was more readily reused and resold, the demand for imports would be significantly reduced.

$200 Billion a year on consumer electronics

Chris Whittome adds “Each American spends on average more than $1200 a year on consumer electronics. If half this amount was bought pre-owned locally, the trade deficit would shrink by $200 Billion a year. The money saved would likely divert to either locally produced goods and/or reduce consumer borrowing.”

More tax revenue for the local and federal government

Local and federal government would also benefit from increases in sales tax revenue as more pre-owned electronics were traded in the local economies at the retail level.

A greener more efficient economy

Tackling ewaste is a primary objective of the Obama Administration’s environmental policy. “Because buying a used product lengthens its life, encouraging pre-owned would also be in harmony with the Administration’s effort to tackle the explosion of e-waste and its links to pollution and global warming.”

Next month, trade2save.com will be launching an online trading portal where customers will be able to sell their pre-owned electronics to them, and also buy used ones with a satisfaction guaranty and 1 year warranty. “We hope that one day soon, buying a pre-owned electronics product will become as common and worry free as buying a certified pre-owned car from a dealership.”

It’s been a long time since our last blog post, in fact this is the first one this year and it’s already May!! But don’t think for a minute that trade2save has been in hibernation. We are very close now to launching a fabtastic new website - having overshot by about 9 months! My friends in the valley reassure us that a 9 month overshoot for a website of this scale is quite normal - well kind words I suppose, but back to the subject title…

We have looked very closely into the very high brow pricing tools that a number of sites are starting to use when buying products off of customers.

In some of my previous blogs I rant about poor trade-in prices given by online e commerce sites who are prepared to buy your used electronics for cash or trade-in value - See my previous posts about Best Buy and Sony (who both use ’sophisticated pricing tools to get you the best possible price’ - ’searching through thousands of prices for up to the second accuracy’) -

The marketing push for this service and also the success of buying-in trading portals like Gazelle (who’ll give you cash for your goods on the spot) show that there is a very large and lucrative market of not so savvy customers who won’t use eBay and flinch at the thought of opening their front door to a potential rapist who answered their ad on Craigslist to buy their used laptop.

These customers choose safety and convenience over squeezing every last buck out of their used digital camera - but boy are they paying through the nose for it!

One thing that unites what I like to call the rip off portals, is the use of so called sophisticated pricing tools. Basically what this means is getting a bot to trawl through sites like eBay and Amazon to get a price for what you’re selling, without them having to hire a team of pricing analysts who answer the phones or live chat with customers without needing to regularly update the prices on their database using standard demand and supply techniques.

The problem with these Bot pricing tools is that although they save trading portals a lot of money in terms of staffing, they are notoriously inaccurate.

To counter this problem, buying portals need to factor in a huge margin (in their favor naturally) - to prevent any inadvertent and costly mistakes the bot has gone and done.

Another issue is that they will never come close to any price a customer could get on eBay or Craigslist, so why bother trying? Why not tap into the market of the unsophisticated and blind them with technology, simplicity and cute little graphs showing a 6 month price index and forecast of the future price expectation (Why does the price graph always look the same?).

At the moment, unsavvy customers wanting to sell or trade-in their electronics can choose the difficulty of eBay or the simplicity of Best Buy, Sony or even Gazelle. I know which choice my mother would take, and this is precisely the market which is proving to be so lucrative - a suprising statistic given the state of everyone’s pockets today.

It’s not a very fair choice for people like my mum, but it’s a choice which they take willingly, in a complicated world, simplicity is the key for them - let others haggle on eBay for those extra bucks their laptop or cellphone might be worth.

Until, that is, they come across a simple, easy and sophisticated site which will actually give them an honest buck for their electronics. Watch this space…

The latest Laptop range from Apple is a new milestone in the company’s ethos to make more environmentally responsible consumer electronics. Critics like Greenpeace, who regularly beat their environmental breast plate to the rhythm of itunes have been strangely silent about the launch until recently. This may have been thanks largely to their inability to adequately market their evidence of ewaste abuse in China and trying to point a finger directly in the face of Steve Jobs.

They learned the hard way that it’s simply not cool to slag off something that’s considered cool to a large sway of their traditional support - college students and graduates. The backlash against Greenpeace was not a calculated stealth mission by a clever PR executive in Cupertino. The backlash came from within and was loudest on the Greenpeace website and blog.

As a result of falling contributions, Greenpeace has had little option but to back off so to speak - but the damage has been done, and it will take some time before they can shake off the conception that they’re a bunch of sanguine pretenders who pick on household brands to gain attention and not much else.

The good they have done on the subject of ewaste should not be swept under the carpet just because they’ve made a few tactical mistakes in their ongoing fight against ewaste.

It was Greenpeace who first opened our eyes to Guiyu, China. It took an organization like Greenpeace with a tradition of cutting through bull and border controls to bring home the shocking images of children, their hands and feet covered in mercury residue while washing themselves in a putrefied river, their single water supply.

Before then, people didn’t have any visual perception of how great the problem was. It was never considered a humanitarian crisis. Visual perception is a powerful weapon that can get things done fast - a power mobilized to full affect during the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5. For months previous we heard of thousands of people starving in Africa, but it took a crack team of BBC journalists to bypass border controls and get the images out. The rest was Bob Geldoff history, live aid and a fund raising PR machine which still raises millions today and provides rock stars like Bono and Sting a ringside seat at G7 summits - such is their influence as power brokers of global public opinion.

The revelations from towns like Guiyu had a similar opportunity to broker a new movement to tackle ewaste as a humanitarian issue, but the solutions proved to be complicate - it was much easier for Geldoff to scream at the camera “Give us your fucking money!” Raising money to buy food for the starving is a challenge - changing the fundamental problems of an eight hundred billion dollar electronics industry is something else.

If the problems of an industry can be distilled down to a single issue it is this: Only 10% of consumer electronics is recyclable. 90% will end up either in the ground or littered on the ground. Extracting the precious 10% out of this ewaste takes the lives of tens of thousands of peasant workers and their families every year through illness and disease caused by the toxic pollution created from the medieval recycling methods employed by their employers, who are (to all extent and purposes) gangsters.

Today GM and Chrysler are chastised for poor cars and wasteful management practices. But they are still able to produce cars which are over 90% recyclable. How is it that a car can be 90% recyclable, yet the greenest computer is still only 10% recyclable?

A car is 90% recyclable, the greenest Laptop is 10% recyclable… here in lies the green myth.

We don’t see mountains of cars rotting in piles so large they can be seen from space because legislation has been active for decades which demands adequate recycling and re-use. Your shinny new Hummer may guzzle that petrol, but you can be sure it’s made of 90% recycled material. Something to consider the next time an eco-warrior on his bicycle smugly tuts you to the tunes of his 10% recyclable iPod.

What’s more, 90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times (through second hand resale) before they are eventually recycled… compare this to 7% of consumer electronics.

90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times before recycling… only 7% of consumer electronics are re-used

Until electronics manufacturers have to abide by the same laws as car makers, the piles of ewaste will continue to double every 4 years. We are not going to stop buying electronics. What we can do is increase the reuse of electronics from a paltry 7% to a more respectable 50-70%, bring them more in line with the car industry. This would mean a significant drop in electronics sales and a dent in the trade of unrecoverable ewaste. We’d still be using the same cool gadgets with the same cool feature. Second Hand is cheaper of course, and with the economy on the bring of a depression, greener use of electronics might come sooner than later.

ewaste is something most people don’t attribute to themselves. But did you know that there is as much ewaste hidden away in homes as there is polluting the drinking water in places like Guiyi, China ?

As ewaste crusaders we want to see more folks trading in or selling their un-used electronics to other folks before they become obsolete. Because once they become obsolete, they become ewaste by definition.

   the answer is to trade in your electronics BEFORE they become obsolete

And that’s why we’re launching trade 2 save.

trade 2 save has been designed to make trading-in and trading up easier, while giving customers an honest trade-in price which is not the case with the ‘we buy’ trading portals currently available on the web.

At trade 2 save you’ll be able to buy and sell in the same transaction. You’ll be able to use the credit from what you’re selling immediately and you’ll get what you’re buying first. This is especially convenient for someone upgrading their cell phone. You get the cell phone you are buying first, and then send us your old cell phone in the packaging we supply (in most cases with free shipping) - all you pay is the difference in price if any. And in the same transaction you could also trade-in a DVD, a computer, some music, an iPod or something else.

And because we test and certify everything we buy off of our customers, the product you buy from trade 2 save will be graded for condition and guaranteed for a full year of normal use. This will enable customers to buy pre-owned with complete confidence.

When you sell to trade 2 save you’ll get 2 prices to choose from, a store credit price and a cash price. The store credit price is usually about 10-15% more than the cash price. The cash price is always good, however, if you are intending to buy something else from trade 2 save now or in the future, it’s always better to take the store credit, which never expires.

trade 2 save also has a marketplace where customers will be able to sell their products to each other using the same trade 2 save product pages. For this service, trade 2 save will take a small commission if you sell but will charge no listing fees whatsoever. It can remain their indefinitely.

trade 2 save will also level the playing field for small private sellers and so called power sellers. There won’t be any preferential rates - everyone will be able to take advantage of the same super low rates for selling on the trade 2 save market place.
We can’t always buy pre-owned, but when you trade something in to us we can sell it on to someone else before it becomes obsolete. Buying pre-owned reduces the amount of units demanded through manufacturing more, which will ultimately end up as ewaste.

   Did you know that only 12% of the material in electronics is recyclable?

Production of electronics and components have more than trebled in just a few years and only 12% of the material from them is actually recyclable (contrary to popular belief).

If you’ve got an old Pentium 3 in your garage that’s been sitting there for 4 years, then it’s too old to be re-used and re-sold. Recycling is the only viable option - providing it is not sent across the water to join a toxic dump (once 12% of it is extracted using toxic chemicals and a blow torch).

If you had traded the Pentium 3 in earlier before it became obsolete, someone else would have bought it pre-owned instead of buying another one new, reducing ewaste by a factor of 1 unit, or about 900 lbs of CO2.

These are tangible small changes to consumer habits which we can make at a time when we need to save money too. Trading-in your electronics and buying pre-owned when feasible doesn’t just make environmental sense it makes economic sense at a time when most of us are having to tighten our belts.

trade 2 save is set to open its beta site by Christmas.

The internet has brought about many great things, but none I believe are more great or more democratic than Craigslist. In an internet crowded with commerce, Craigslist enables everyday people to sell directly to each other. As most people do not pay a fee, it brings democracy to an internet dominated by big business.

However, buying from Craigslist does have drawbacks as some buyers from the site will contest to. When you buy off of Craigslist, you’re buying from a private seller - who is not obliged to offer any form of warranty. Buy sell and trade merchants (online or otherwise) have their advantages in this case, where customers can return goods if damaged.

Most Craigslist buys and sales have no problems, so if you’re prepared to take a small risk, you should always be able to find the cheapest price for the used product you’re after.

Online buy sell trade merchants like spun, secondspin, preplayed and soon to be launched trade 2 save, will always have their place when it comes to reliability, service and convenience.

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.

I was shocked to discover that each year millions of tons of used gadgets wind up in a bottom draw after only a relatively short time of use.

There’s no escaping that we live in a vibrant consumer economy, and this is no bad thing - those of us who desire today’s most popular gadgets help drive the economy forward.

The problem is that electronics products which still have significant value and usability are finding their way into the bottom draw instead of being returned to the marketplace for resale to someone who is perfectly happy with last years model. After all, it works perfectly well and does the same job.

Instead, a mountain of unused electronics lay idle, eventually becoming too old to be of any use to a potential buyer.

        Imagine you bought a new car and left the old one sitting in your garage until it’s value diminished to nothing.

In reality you’d sell it - because the sooner you do the more value you’ll get - this is just as true for gadgets like iPods, cell phones, digital cameras, console games and computers - more and more of these products end up in the bottom draw when they could be sold and re-used before their time is up.

eBay has gone a long way in expanding the second hand market and makes it easier for consumers to sell on their used electronics. But its impact has been relatively small compared to the rising tide of productivity within the electronics industry.

Consumers should be able to sell on their used electronics as readily as they can buy the upgrade - like a car dealership who’ll readily accept your old car in the same transaction. It spares you the hassle of selling it yourself.

So shouldn’t the electronics industry work in the same way?

Well, to some extent it does -  GameStop for example, will accept your old gaming console and games as trade ins. However, they give you a faction of the amount you could have gotten on eBay or Craigslist. But not everyone enjoys trawling through the buyers and sellers trying to get a deal - some of us are just too busy - or lazy.

If trading in was made easier, and fairer in terms of the value you received, fewer electronics would end up in a bottom draw. The sad truth is that if you don’t get intrinsic pleasure from the eBay experience and you don’t feel the profit is worth your time and energy, your old gadgets will end up in the bottom draw for some time to come.

I must have - I must have now - the instinctive response when Mummy wheeled your stroller past the Hershey aisle. The same instinct is alive and kicking as thousands line the streets today for the latest in electronics gluttony- the 3G iPhone.(SUPER-SIZE ME!)The iPhone is a phenomenal product - no question - and would have remained a phenomenal product unchanged for another few years  - but now it’s just another piece of junk pushed aside for a spanking new upgrade - the 3G iPhone.Let’s face it - features like GPS and 3G could have been included in iPhone 1.0 but were held back to (1) Create further record sales for a later model and (2) ensure that the original iPhone would be perceived to be obsolete as quickly as possible.It’s a prime example of the marketing employed by companies like Apple who have deliberately instigated the e-waste crisis. I call it deliberate because Apple and the other electronics giants are fully aware that greater amounts of e-waste is a direct result of their drive to make previous models obsolete as quickly as they can.How different is the new iPhone 3G from the iPhone 1.0? Surprisingly, not very much. Apart from having 3G and GPS.What else is new?

• Your inbox will be the same and act just as fast and soon you’ll be able to download software to make your iPhone 1.0 email faster and more secure.

• Your old iPhone supports ActiveSync just like the new one.

• Your old iPhone supports all the new enterprise functionality of the Blackberry.
• Plus you’re old iPhone (it’s just crazy to call this thing old) is going to be able to capitalize on all the new applications pouring out thanks to the long awaited SDK release (Software Development Kit).
• 3G streaming video will be faster, but none of the stuff I love to watch on YouTube will be there because of copyright protection - and of course in a Wifi area you’ll have no advantage over iPhone 1.0.

Oh yes- the old iPhone is about 2 mil thinner, so the 3G will feel a little bulkier in your pocket.I find 3G still sluggish compared to the broadband speed I’m used to in most Wifi Cafes… for a good all round review go to engadget.  A better alternativeMy advice is to stay with your original iPhone - if you really have to have the 3G model because you totally rely on the Edge for internet connectivity and not Wifi then at least wait 2 or 3 weeks until some mint pre-owned 3Gs are on the market.Then just sell your old iPhone and upgrade. This way you won’t be adding another new cell phone onto the market. Every time you buy a new cell phone you’re adding another onto the e-waste pile - and only 12.5% of that will be recycled.Later in the year we’re going to start trade 2 save. We’ll happily accept the iPhone 1.0 in graded conditions and sell pre-owned 2.0 and 1.0 iPhones in graded conditions, from like new, very good and good (all with a 1 year warranty). By trading in this way you’ll be able to upgrade without breaking the bank and without creating more e-waste.What’s more, trade 2 save will be a pre-owned electronics market place, where you can trade-in all your used electronics in working condition including all electronics, accessories, computer hardware, laptops, PCs, Gaming, Movies and entertainment.

WALL-E is one of the better animations to come out of the Disney Pixar creative collaboration.

It’s a heart warming tale of WALL-E, a Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class unit. The lovable robot manages to stay functional after 700 years of service by recycling bits of other WALL-E robots which have perished over the centuries of cleaning up the Earth.

A thousand years earlier in the 21st Century, the Buy ‘N’ Large corporation had (miraculously) taken over every single service on Earth, including the government. They are to blame for the rampant over production and subsequent pollution that ensues - turning Earth into a wasteland of e-waste and junk - void of humans, who generations later, remain living lethargically on a space cruiser many light years away.

The Buy ‘N’ Large corporation is a more acceptable bad guy to portray than the dozens of consumer brands who benefit from today’s throw away society.

A more realistic landscape (the one we see today in Asia) would be the mountains of e-waste filled with broken Sony plasma screens, Panasonic DVD players and colored iPod shells. This later imagery would never have gotten passed Disney’s largest stock holder.

The real message to be taken from this summer’s No. 1 blockbuster is that most of what makes up e-waste today is non recyclable and has absolutely nowhere to go.

    only about 12% of the e-waste we produce is recycled. The rest will joint the mountains of e-waste which one day might challenge the Himalayas.

We see the pictures of Chinese villagers picking their way through circuit boards and recovering the poisonous alloys and by-product, but this only makes up about 12% of the junk that we ship to them. The rest stays strewn across the countryside on e-waste dumps which closely resemble the make believe ones depicted in WALL-E.

If the electronics we produce today are largely non recyclable, why is the drive towards recycling them so prevalent, when a drive to re-use them or make them last longer goes relatively unheard?

So long as the green back is more powerful than the green lobby, more funds will be driven towards green perception than green reality - The burying of the National Computer Recycling Act is testament to this. Only when every bit of electronics is recyclable (and this includes Xbox, Playstation, Wii too) will we be able to start slowing the acceleration of e-waste dumping.

Until the Utopian vision of green electronics magically appears - which will be decades away at best - consumers need to look at other ways to lower the rising tide of e-waste: Buy a pre-owned or used computer, digital camera, cell phone or any electronics device when you can.

When you buy something new you add to the e-waste pile - when you buy used you don’t.

Sell pre-owned or used as well. If you don’t use your old computer, DVD player, cell phone, digital camera or camcorder any more, trade it in or sell it pre-owned  or used so that someone else will buy it from you instead of buying it new and adding to e-waste themselves.

For additional trust, buy used off of a pre-owned retailer who is willing to give a one year warranty on your purchase. That way, you have as much confidence as buying new.

With companies like trade 2 save launching to give consumers more confidence in the pre-owned and used consumer electronics market, we hope that more consumers will take matters into their own hands and prevent the e-waste catastrophe so beautifully animated in WALL-E.