Snapdeal, the online marketplace to day launched Reglobe, the re-commerce site where it takes old laptops and phones from consumers and pay them cash based on the assessed value.

Although, it has been existence in US for a while with sites like Gazelle  been in existence for last 6-7 years, it is for the first time a large e-commerce player has launched in India.

While today a user can sell his used goods on Ebay, ebay only acts as a facilitator/platform enabling consumer to sell the goods based on the market economics and Ebay takes a transaction fee in the transaction.

In the case of Gazelle or Reglobe, consumers need to ship the goods, they are assessed by the company and then paid in cash.

What do Reglobe of the world do with the used goods :-

1. Set up an ecommerce shop to sell the used goods to consumers:-  Sell Snapdeal verified second hand electronic goods. Possible, but user would prefer to shop for used goods on ebay where the user is likely to get a better deal because of platform-> auction etc. In short, ebay has all incentive to make the marketplace transparent because they have no business risk in doing that… but on the other hand, snapdeal would want to maximize the profits from used goods

2.. Sell them back to consumers on sites like Ebay, Amazon: –  Not sure how profitable it is to sell used goods on internet because of the lemon’s problem.

3.  Sell the goods to third world countries / third world markets: This is interesting, because in third world markets, used goods will be valued more.

2. Sell it to scrap dealer / for recycling:-  This is again very interesting, because the perceptible value of a scrap phone ( not in working condition) is much lower than the actual value in terms of recovery post recycling.   For more information read this: Your Dead Iphone is a Gold Mine

The punch line is, there’s more gold in a pound of electronics than a pound of gold ore,