ChanceXChange.com: Recycling for the Digital Age

We live in a materialistic age, a capitalist society, and let's face it: most of us have way too much stuff.

Maybe your relatives have a vague idea that you like to read, but their well-meaning gifts of romance novels just don't jibe with your preference for sci-fi. Maybe you still have all your old Celine Dion albums and don't know what to do with them besides use them as coasters... face down, of course. Or maybe, like me, you signed up for the Columbia House DVD club, not realizing they would send you everything except the DVDs you really wanted, and you were too lazy to package them up and ship them back.

ChanceXChange.com offers users the chance to get rid of stuff they don't want, and receive stuff they do.

How It Works

Users list the things they don't want anymore, in categories including Books, Films, Games, Music, and Miscellaneous. Each category has a number of subcategories: Fiction or Nonfiction for Books, DVD or VHS for Films, a wide selection of electronic platforms for Games, and CD or Tape for Music. User-specified categories are also available. Each listing includes the title, author / director / artist / creator, and optional fields for notes, item condition, and an image of the item.

The first two items you list will earn you one free credit. After that, to get credits, you'll have to wait for someone else to decide they want something you've listed. When someone claims one of your items, it is automatically removed from the list of available items, and you receive an email notifying you that someone has requested the item. You send the item, they confirm its receipt, and a credit is transferred from them to you. Now you can find something listed by someone else that you want, and spend your credit on it.

Upsides

This service is totally free. Free to join, free to trade, and astonishingly low on the spam-o-meter. The only cost associated is in posting items to people who request them, and that's a pretty reasonable cost. I've mailed out two DVDs that cost about a dollar each to send, and received a book that bore a stamped mailing price of about $0.50. The items traded on this website all tend to be faily small, which makes shipping a minimal issue.

Since first opening in December of 2006, the website has added considerable enhancements, and seems to have an attentive and capable development staff behind it. Initial listings featured only category, name, and artist; the item list was one giant list sorted by Last-In-First-Out order; and there was no way to contact trader or requester, nor dispute a trade gone awry. Today the listings are more detailed, there are friendly icons to sort listings by category, and handy "NEW" indicators help skimmers peruse the latest offerings. Better still, the lines of communication have been opened to allow either party to dispute the status of a trade.

Finally, the website automatically prevents international trades. While some could perceive this as a negative, it saves anyone from having to pay international postage, and also prevents the problem of exchanging DVDs with different region codes. Each user will only see trades within their own country.

Downsides

This is a free service, which means there will always be people who take advantage of it. It's possible to sign up for multiple acounts, list items that nobody would ever want to get the free credits, request items of yourself, and in that fashion transfers more credits to your main account. A few items currently listed in the Miscellaneous section include "Cheetos, Tasty" (this has been there for months), "highlighter / ballpoint pens" (ditto), a collection of McDonald's Happy Meal toys, and my personal favorite, "used cap," described as "plastic piece of junk, used soda cap,slightly chewed."

Also, since all items are offered on the "honor system," there is no guarantee that you'll receive what you request. Even though the website now has a way to dispute trades, it's still pretty disappointing to request something and then not receive it. I joined the website on the first day it was opened, and so far have made four requests. Only one has actually yielded the requested item. The seller may take their sweet time about posting the item (leaving you to wonder if your request has been eaten by the internet), may lie and say they sent it when they didn't, or (most irksome or all) may simply decide to cancel the offer. However, this is much less of a problem now than it was at the website's inception, since the dispute system lets you basically cancel the exchange if the offering party does not respond, or if the item never arrives.

Tips

Having been with the website since Day 1, I've learned a few useful tidbits for those interested in getting in on the trades.

1. People skim for new items. If your item has been sitting for awhile, nobody is going to notice it. If you really want to get rid of it, remove it and re-list. There's no cost associated with either action, and it means the skimmers will have a chance to see it when they might have missed it before.

2. When enhancements are made to item listings, older items miss out. Again, just remove them and re-list. People will be more likely to claim a movie they see is a DVD than one that gives no indication as to media type. Same for CDs vs tapes.

3. Don't be afraid to list things, no matter how unlikely you may think it is that someone will claim it. I hated the Robin Williams movie RV, yet someone else wanted it, and I got a new book out of the deal. Go figure.

4. You will get a better response by listing the headline actor, rather than the director, for DVDs. The exception to this is big-name directors. Peter Jackson is likely to get noticed. Barry Sonnenfeld, not so much.

Overall, I find that the services's positives outweigh its negatives. As I've already pointed out, the site has grown exponentially since first opening as an almost graphics-free, text-heavy, basic input-output forms website. It obviously has a team of implementors who are learning the inherent difficulties associated with an honor-based exchange system, and have responded to them in a positive and timely manner. So take the stack of CDs you haven't listened to since the 1990s and head over to ChanceXChange.com. Your music shelf will thank you for it.