Target End-of-Summer Email Blast Pushes iPhone Trade-Ins
Target pushed its electronics trade-in program in an email blast to its customer list Friday. In advance of the launch of the iPhone 5, the company is just winding up an iPhone trade-in program that ends Saturday. The limited-time promotion, which began Aug. 12, delivers gift cards of $150 for any iPhone 4, $100 for any 3GS and $50 for any 3G to customers who bring trade-ins to stores. We typed in the three criteria for a 32GB iPhone 4S: in good working order, fully functional no cracked display, and received a card value of $245.
Customers can trade in any of more than 20,000 items in store or by mail, according to the website. Shoppers follow a three-step process online including finding a store according to city, state or ZIP code, getting a quote for a product in store and getting paid on the spot via a Target gift card. Online customers get a quote by plugging in a product model number and then answering questions about the condition of the product.
We entered several products to see the range of value held by particular products and categories. A Bose Sound Dock came up empty and there was no category for audio returns on the list. A Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS3 10-megapixel digital camera had a 14-point checklist including questions covering whether the camera images were focused and sharp, if it stored images to a memory card, if parts worked correctly and if the battery still charged. We answered positively for all performance-related questions but answered no to having the owner’s manual or original box. We received a quote of $61.75 for the camera without the manual and box and $63.75 with the camera and box.
Newer tablets hold up in value far better than older laptops, as expected. A “good condition” Gateway laptop with less than 500GB storage and less than 4 GB memory would fetch $24.83 according to the online calculator. A “beat up” but working Kindle Fire, with 11 checklist questions, returned a value of $16.45, while a “good” Fire with no performance issues or scratches brought in $68.56, a little less than half its estimated bill of materials. A Samsung 10-inch Galaxy 32GB tablet in good working order would bring in $133.69, according to the value calculator. A first-gen 64GB iPad, without the original box, traded at $143, whether “like new” or “good.”
Trade-in quotes are good for 21 days from NextWorth.com, which administers the program for Target. Shipping is free via pre-paid labels that are issued after the customer fills out required information, the website said. Roughly 10 business days following inspection of the returned item, payment is initiated for a gift card, it said. Categories available for online trade-ins include iPhones, iPads, iPods, cellphones, point-and-shoot and DSLR cameras, tablets and e-readers, GPS devices, Apple laptops, laptops, calculators, game consoles and videogames and DVD and Blu-ray discs, it said. Audio products, desktop computers, TVs and Blu-ray/DVD players weren’t on the list.
The in-store trade-in program is available in 1,490 of Target’s 1,700-plus stores, according to the website. NextWorth also powers the electronics trade-in programs for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, J&R and MovieStop, with the total number of retail locations in the U.S. using NextWorth’s platform at roughly 2,200, it said. The NextWorth program focuses reuse first, while end-of-life products and scrap created by the refurbishing process are collected by NextWorth and prepared for recycling, the company said. NextWorth partners exclusively with “responsible and committed” e-Stewards and R2-certified recyclers, according to the company website.