Selling your unwanted stuff can be a hassle. First you have to make a listing, coordinate with the buyer and set up payment. It’s also not exactly the safest thing to hook up with a complete stranger that you answered your ad on Craigslist. The good news is that if you’re selling electronics, there’s an easy way to get extra money for your unwanted stuff without all that hassle and risk. The Decluttr app makes selling your old tech (as well as books and LEGO® products) fast and simple.
What is Decluttr?
Decluttr is website/smartphone app that makes it easy to sell specific categories of unwanted stuff, including:
- Game consoles
- Smartphones
- Tablets
- Wearables
- CDs
- DVDs
- Blu-rays
- Video games
- Books
- LEGO® products
Instead of simply providing a platform where you resell your old stuff, Decluttr pays you for it directly. So, there’s no fuss with product listings or shady exchanges.
Debt.com spoke to Decluttr’s Head of Marketing James Bell, who said the company aims to make second-hand selling “as easy and pain-free for consumers as possible.”
“The customers have all these items they want to declutter, but no one has the time to list the products themselves,” Bell said. “That’s where we come in.”
How does Decluttr work?
In Decluttr’s words, you simply:
- Scan it.
- Send it.
- Spend it.
You basically sign up for the service, then use your smartphone to scan the barcodes of the products you want to sell. If you’re on the website, you can simply enter the barcode number. Then Decluttr will tell you how much they’re willing to pay for each item.
You take all the items you entered and pack them up in a box. Then they give you a mailing label so you can ship the items for free. The shipping goes through UPS, so you find a UPS dropoff location and send the box along.
Once Decluttr receives your items, they’ll decide if the items are in good enough condition to give you the original price quoted. They have a Tech Price Promise, which means if they give you a lower price once the items are shipped, you can tell them that you don’t want the deal. If so, they’ll ship them back to you free of charge.
You can get paid on your items using Direct Deposit to your bank account, through PayPal or by mailed check.
Why is Decluttr better than other resale websites?
Unlike seller services like Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or Swappa, Decluttr’s charm is that you don’t need to have any charm to get paid — no people skills are required or needed.
Finally, in what Bell said was “taking the pain out of the transaction,” one of Decluttr’s value propositions to its users is handling the handoff so sellers don’t have to list their products, haggle for good prices, or meet with potential buyers.
According to Bell, “this gives people a sense of trust.”
Decluttr app reviews
Decluttr is available for iPhone and Android. It has 4/5 stars on Google Paly with over 3,600 reviews and 4.3/5 stars with almost 1,300 reviews in the iPhone app store. They also have a 4/5 on TrustPilot with over 6,500 reviewed, and 82% of those are 5-start. The reviews are extremely strong in either direction – people either really love this service and praise it for being so easy or hate it and call it a scam.
Positive reviews
People who love Decluttr praise it for the simplicity. Scanning a few barcodes, slapping a mailing label on a package and hitting up UPS is a lot easier (and safer) than trying to resell your stuff on through services like Craigslist. Scanning the barcodes is hassle-free and even entering them manually is still pretty easy.
Positive reviewers often admitted that they received less than the full price they were quoted. However, they mostly pointed out that they were still getting paid with minimal effort. Decluttr essentially made it easy to sell and get a little extra money for stuff you probably would have thrown out or donated anyway.
Negative reviews
There are three big complaints that lead people to 1-star Decluttr reviews:
- “It didn’t give me the money I was expecting / promised.”
- “They didn’t send my stuff back as promised.”
- “I never received my payment / my payment was extremely late.”
The first complaint is largely an issue of expectations. People went in expecting to get big money for their old junk and when they only got a few bucks back, Decluttr failed to meet their expectations.
The next group of complaints were more concerning. The Tech Price Promise assures people that if they don’t like the price they end up getting, Declutter will send all of the items back for free. There are people who insist that they only received a few of their items back or nothing at all. Most of these negative reviewers say Decluttr’s customer service team basically ghosted them and refused to respond.
Ghosting was also the big complaint when it came to payments not being processed on time (or at all). People say they never received their money. Sometimes Decluttr would tell them they’d just cut a check, but that check was never received.
The final word on the Decluttr app
If you want to make some extra money by selling your unwanted stuff with minimal hassle, Decluttr is a good way to go. Just be sure you have the right expectations. You may only end up getting a few bucks, but that’s money in your pocket that you wouldn’t have had if you just tossed or donated the stuff. And while you might be able to get top dollar by reselling your stuff directly, that’s more time, hassle and risk that you may want to take. But if you want a hassle-free way to make some extra cash, Decluttr is definitely worth a try.
