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Paul Nelson reportingSay you get tired of that first edition Xbox, and you want to see how much you can get for it. You've got several options. One, you could unload it in a garage sale, but you probably won't get top dollar for it.
Then of course, there's Ebay.
"Electronics are one of the better categories on Ebay," says "I sold it on Ebay" President and CEO Steve Goldman. "Certainly they do well depending on what type and what the demand is."
"The beauty of Ebay is, you could get more than your asking price," he said.
Goldman says collectible electronics like the old Commodore 16-bit computers sell very well. "We just, in January, sold a lamp that we thought was going to sell for $700 or so, which would have been a lot of money for a lamp. It sold for $12,000," he says.
The downside is there is no guarantee your item will sell at all. A relatively young company called TechForward is trying a new service, where it will guarantee to buy back your electronics, if you buy from them, and if you pay a fee.
"There are people that are always looking for the newest, the fastest, the largest, the best or the smallest product, and they're willing to spend more money for a premium product," says Politis Communications President David Politis.
Here's an example of how it works. You buy, say, a Pioneer 52 inch LCD flatscreen TV. You pay a fee of $109, and the company will buy it back up to two years later. If you sell it back within three months, they'll pay over $2,400. If you wait two years, you'll get $990.
Politis says tech analysts can predict how valuable electronics, like a computer, will be in the future. "You buy it today, it costs you $2,000, you should be able to predict in 18 months $750 or $1,000, because there is a curve. If you can figure out the math, figure out the algorithms, you can predict that."
Not every kind of electronic device is for sale on TechForward. Remember the Microsoft Origami? Nobody's buying those back.
"I suspect that what you're going to see TechForward and companies like that do is they're going to go with established market leaders or products where there is a known commodity," says Politis.
Politis says the concept of the buy-back isn't new. Several Utah companies have been doing it for a long time. A Logan company once got famous for remarketing the old Apple "Lisa" computers, which were made before the McIntosh.
