By Kye Poronsky
It’s a Sunday afternoon and you’ve spent the last three days playing the same video games you’ve been playing since you were 12. You get up to look at your DVDs and realize you’ve seen all these movies a thousand times before. So, you resort to your bookshelf and find nothing that you want to read, and you’d listen to music, but the only CDs you own anymore are ‘N SYNC and Britney Spears.
Where do you go from here? Two Boston College graduates have the answer.
In June of 2004, Mark Hexamer and Greg Boesel co-founded an interactive, eBay-esque Web site created to solve problems just like those mentioned above. The site is Swaptree.com. With a click of a button you can trade your old ‘N SYNC album for that CD you’ve always wanted, or for the book you’ve been pining to read. All you have to pay for is the shipping.
Boesel sparked the idea for the Web site.
“Greg and I are pretty avid readers,” Hexamer explained. On the same note, he said the two were constantly getting books from their mothers, so “it was kind of something we were already doing.”
The pair was able to raise $2 million to get the site up and running and they now keep it going with funds from advertisers.
“We don’t make any money off of the trades,” Hexamer said.
The site works like eBay, except instead of receiving money, you will receive a new book, CD, DVD or video game. You log onto the site and type in the barcode on the back of your item and then post it.
After posting it, a list of books, or whatever you are trying to trade, will show up. You then select the book you want and ask the other user if they’d like to accept your trade. Once it is accepted, all you do is print out the postage label and mail it out.
Swaptree will give you the postage label that you need. You just pay for the shipping, which the site calculates for you, print out the label and mail your media.
The site also allows you to trade one media for another. If you want to trade a book for a CD, a CD for a video game, a video game for a DVD, etc., it’s all possible.
“We’re really big with parents. We’re also big with college students,” said Hexamer. “We have groups for every college in the U.S.A.”
A University student can log onto the Web site and see that someone down the hall has “Super Mario World” for Super Nintendo. The students can do the trade in person, as opposed to going through the task of shipping.
“We can create casual connections,” Hexamer commented.
He expressed his excitement about the site and how they are trying to change consumer habits by “consuming less, sharing more.” He said the site is there to “satisfy the media needs for yourself and your family.”
For more information visit Swaptree.com, or enter keword “swaptree” on YouTube.