It was in my student days when I was hard pushed for money that I used musicmagpie.co.uk. I had seen the advert on the telly and knew I had boxes and boxes of unwanted CDs up in the loft so thought I may as well give it a try. I am very glad I did!

Firstly, I found the website to be user friendly and very informative in terms of how the process works. In summary though, you need to register to the site (which is easy and quick to do) and then can start selling immediately by simply clicking the 'Start Selling' button!

When you start selling, you are required to enter the barcode of every item you want to sell in order for the site to generate a value for each item. This can be done manually or they do offer a service whereby you can use your webcam as a barcode scanner. I thought this was a brilliant idea to save time so opted for this...but it didn't work well at all and I was less than impressed! I am not sure whether I was just unlucky and had a bad experience, but the scanner rarely recognised the barcodes no matter what angle I held them at and in the end I gave up and entered them all manually. So one thing I would say is be prepared for it to be pretty time consuming. Although a plus point is that you can save your progress at any point and go back to it later to add more items.

So how much are the items worth then? Well it completely depends on what you are selling I suppose but in my experience, I have found that most of my CDs were valued at 30p with rarer items I had reaching up to around £1-£2. The few games and DVDs I sold were usually valued at between 75p-£1.50. Whilst I realise this does not sound much, it can quickly add up to a reasonably good total. In my opinion, with CDs becoming pretty much obsolete now with invention of ipods, anything I got for them was a bonus as they were just gathering dust! Roughly, I think I sold around 120 CDs and a couple of DVDs and PC/PS3 games and was quoted £58 which I thought was really good.

If you are happy with the valuation, sending the items is also very simple to do with good instructions again being available on the website. And the best part about it is that it's completely free, making it better than other sites such as Amazon or Ebay! You will need the freepost label which you can either get them to send to you or print off yourself. Then all you need to do basically is secure your items in a box, ensure the label is visible and either take it to the post office or they even offer a courier service to come and pick the box up from you, so it really couldn't be more convenient and easy.

I am very sceptical in general and there are loads of conditions on the website such as all items must have original booklets with them, no cracked cases, only minor scratches etc so I wasn't convinced I would receive the whole amount, but I did. So I can definitely say that they are fair with their pricing and checking procedures, as some of my cases weren't in the best of conditions. Also, they are very good at keeping you up to date with what is happening with your parcel and inform you when they receive it, when they are processing it and when they have despatched your cheque. I am guessing too that they would contact you if the valuation changed but as this was not the case, I cannot vouch for this.

Overall, I would definitely recommend musicmagpie.co.uk and I will be straight back on it if I discover anymore CDs or DVDs hiding anywhere. It is a way of getting rid of clutter and earning money from things you no longer use! I would recommend only selling through musicmagpie.co.uk if you have a fairly large selection of items as individually they aren't worth much at all. Also, they could improve the scanning as this would make the process quicker and be more prompt with payment as it does take around 2 weeks but then again, they are giving you money for things that are unwanted so these are minor points for a really useful service overall.

5 stars from me!