Great idea, but very poor value (musicmagpie.co.uk)

Member Name: stuff10

Product:	musicmagpie.co.uk
Date:	30/06/09 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I suppose it could be useful if you need to pay off a particularly nasty loan shark

Disadvantages: Terrible value when compared to PlayTrade, Amazon Marketplace and eBay

I first heard about Music Magpie after reading about it in Web User magazine. The premise is pretty simple: Music Magpie will buy your old CDs, DVDs and books off of you for cash. I have lots of old CDs and DVDs lying around the house and so the idea immediately grabbed my attention. I booted up my computer and visited the website (www.musicmagpie.co.uk) to see what my collection was worth.

The website has a relatively basic but functional design although I'm not a great fan of the colourscheme, or the rather bland logo... what's the point in calling your company Music Magpie if you're not going to have at least an element of a magpie in your logo!? Anyway, I digress... Upon visiting the website you're immediately greeted with a large text box in which to input your items. Instead of searching for a product title, you instead put in the item's bar code - which make it much quicker to use.

Once you've entered a bar code the website gives you a price that they'll pay you for the item... but this is where the fun stops.

I tried the website out by getting around a dozen DVDs and entering the bar code - my combined offer was around £10. Not happy with this I looked at other avenues to get rid of my DVDs and eventually decided to try them on PlayTrade. A couple of months later and I've made almost £300 by selling DVDs on PlayTrade - I probably wouldn't have made £70 if I'd have sold them to Music Magpie!

And that's the reason I've rated it 1/5 - I understand that Music Magpie have to make money, but the amount they offer you for your old DVDs and CDs is ridiculous. You'd be much, much, much better off selling them on PlayTrade, Amazon Marketplace or eBay.

If you use Music Magpie, you'll be losing money.

Summary: Use PlayTrade, Amazon Marketplace or eBay instead