Newegg Now Offers a Graphics Card Trade-In Program
Newegg offers an alternative to selling your used GPU
We all know that eBay is something of a nightmare, particularly when attempting to sell certain high-ticket items such as graphics cards (writing from experience – maybe you’ve always have great luck). Anyhow, Newegg of all places has an alternative, as they are announcing a new service where you can trade-in a used graphics card for credit towards a new one. Newegg says that this is accomplished via a single transaction on their site, and of course you don’t have to pay selling fees as you would on eBay.
How Newegg Trade-In Works
1.) Shopping for a New GPU and Eligibility Confirmation: Customers interested in acquiring a new graphics card in exchange for their GPU can find a banner on most graphics card product pages on Newegg.com. A pop-up form enables them to verify whether their graphics card qualifies for the trade-in program. An easy-to-complete form collects details like chipset, model and brand.
2.) Preliminary Offer and Shipping to Newegg: Based on the customer’s submitted information, an initial shopping credit offer for a new graphics card will be shown on the website. If the customer decides to accept the trade-in offer and also purchases a new graphics card on the website, a prepaid shipping label and instructions will be emailed. This enables customers to send their graphics card to Newegg at no cost within 14 days.
3.) Evaluation and Credit Disbursement: Upon receiving the graphics card, Newegg will conduct an inspection to ensure it matches the submitted information. Once verified, the customer will receive a credit in the amount of the offer applied to their new graphics card purchase. The credit will be refunded to their account via their original payment method. However, if the information provided is inaccurate or Newegg declines the customer’s graphics card submission, no credit will be issued and the graphics card will be returned to the customer.
This program sounds like a great idea, and was obviously adopted by the mobile phone industry years ago as phones rose to 2023 GPU-like prices – but it remains to be seen if there will be any growing pains with the new program. It goes without saying that any delays or problems with their inspection/evaluation process will be very frustrating. If they pull this off – if users are offered a fair price and get their credit quickly – Newegg will sell a lot of new graphics cards.
Seems doomed for failure. I can imagine a bunch of mining cards flowing in and tons of RMAs or otherwise really unhappy users where they find that the used videocard they purchased is randomly artifacting on screen or being unstable at stock speeds. Odds are likely the previous owner tried to min-max their mining profitability by keeping the card at the edge of its thermal tolerances to try and straddle the line of keeping up with the GPU compute arms race while also trying to minimize the delta between TGP and TBP. Tons of cards get abused that way finally being cleaned and dumped on the used market, and it is hard to tell how much testing Newegg will do beyond just testing if the card works enough to display an image on the screen.