gadget recycling sites

There seems to be an explosion lately of gadget recycling sites. The latest a friend sent me is NextWorth. They are all basically the same. Enter your gadget type, age, condition and they will give you a trade in or purchase price. They will send you a box and you sell it to them. Some get a bit creative and try to upsell you the new gadget right there, but most just offer you cash. The idea is that the early adopters need somewhere to get rid of their new old toys. What these sites all do is basically have a database of pricing trends off of ebay and other resale sites and offer to buy items for approximately 50% of the trailing 4 weeks price (a rough estimate on my own). They plan to resell the item immediately and make 100% profit. Not a bad business. But I wonder how hard it is for these gadget people to just post it on ebay themselves. It will be interesting if any of these guys make any money.

I doubt they will make money on the “newly used” stuff < 1 year. but they may be able to act as a collector of the longer tail of stuff in the states where the manufacturers are being forced to provide total lifecycle managment.