Make Money Selling Physical Media

Recently I needed to make some space, so I decided to sell my DVDs and some of my CDs.  I have large CD collection and many of them were miscellaneous or duplicates, those were ripped into my iTunes and sold.  I kept many of my favorite albums and all of the work released by my favorite artists.  But in order to make some money off of this physical media I did a little research online to see which services were best.  I decided to start with Music Magpie to sell most of my DVDs to.  I liked their site because it also had an app and you could scan barcodes with your computer's webcam.  I had a lot of DVDs that I wanted to sell so if I could scan barcodes instead of typing them all in I was all for it.  Plus Music Magpie's site said that they would cut their customers a check for their trade-in value.  I also checked out Amazon's Trade-In site, their site was nice but instead of giving their customers a check, in return for trade-ins customers would receive Amazon Store Credit.  It seemed like Amazon was giving slightly more for the trade-ins.  I decided to start with Music Magpie because I wanted actual cash instead of Amazon credit forcing me to purchase something from them. 

I proceeded to scan my DVDs for Music Magpie, the mobile app on my iPad and the web app for my laptop were very faulty.  The scanning didn't work as easily as barcode scanner apps that I had used in the past.  So I ended up just typing that barcodes into the site.  I totaled about $70 but not all of my DVDs were recognized or accepted by the site.  I decided to take those to Amazon.  Instead of typing the barcodes with into their site the search field accepted the title of the media and allowed you to select the one that you wanted to trade into them.  I totaled up an additional $30 from Amazon.  I shipped both boxes of DVDs via UPS using old Amazon boxes I had laying around on Feb 18th.  Both sites paid for the shipping and allowed you to print your labels directly from the site.  By February 21st Amazon had given me a credit on my Amazon account, so at that point I punched in my CDs to their site and shipped them off on the 26th.  I received the credit for about $50 for the CDs on March 1st.  The Amazon turn around time for payments seemed to be 4-5 business days.  At this point I had only received emails from Magpie stating that they had received my shipment and that they were reviewing it.   I finally received my check from them March 9th, approximately 15 business days later.

In review I would probably just use amazon in the future since I use Amazon to purchase household items on a regular basis.  Plus Amazon had higher payouts due to the fact that they were giving you store credit.  It's nice to have actual cash that you can do anything you want with but then again waiting 3 weeks just seems too long.  I was starting to think that I got scammed.  Both experiences were simple and you can't really go wrong with either it's mainly about how you want your money and how soon you would like it.