Opa Opa wrote:Thanks for discussing estarland. I looked up their trade-in program and it looks like it functions better than amazon's.
eStarland is pretty good, but a few freckles for sure.
They are pretty strict on condition of games received, not as strict on games sent out. Meaning, if you send a CD game, you may get credit, it'll say something like, "deduction, scratches" so instead of $5 on that disc, you get like $2.60, but they still sell it at their full price. My first 10-15 orders I was really impressed w/condition - 4 of my last 5 orders i've had condition concerns. One I let go, the other 3 I reported, one was handled well and I was offered a return - the other they kept requesting additional pictures, and the other yet they still haven't responded to.
Cashout is a real headache - it pays 70% cash (so if you have $200 in credit, it's really only worth $140 real dollars). If you request a payout - in my 3 experiences, I had to hound them to get the checks, once took 5 weeks, once took 6 weeks, the other hadn't showed for 5 weeks, I contacted them on live-chat, they said it would be done today, 10 days went by, they said it would be done today, a week went by, I told him to just transfer it to my paypal. The next day they transferred it to my paypal...as goods, so paypal took 3.5%, so ultimately you get 66.5% real cash on a cashout.
The free shipping is cool, but you have to send at least $100 and 10 or more items. You really need to send at least $110 of goods, because if you send say $103 and you get a deduction, all of sudden you are at $98 of approved trade-ins, thus under the $100 to qualify for free shipping, so then they deduct the shipping charge of $12-15, so all of a sudden your $103 trade in gets you $83 trade in dollars, which is about $58 real dollars. So...i'm not saying they aren't a good resource, i'm saying they get a lot of first blush praise but they have their warts too.