This review of Sell it Back is from the perspective of private sellers wanting to sell secondhand books. I tested out Sell it Back when selling my own unwanted books online and compared them to their main UK competitors.
About Sell it Back:
Sell it Back are a UK company and only operate in the UK.
There’s no further information on the site about the company’s ownership or location.
They attract a 4-star rating from their site users on Trustpilot.
How to Submit Your Items on Sell it Back:
Sell it Back have an app available on Apple and Google which scans your bar codes and gives instant offers.
Or you can enter the barcode, ISBN or EAN for each book on the website. There is no bulk entry facility.
Additional items you can sell at Sell it Back:
As well as books, they buy CD’s, DVD’s & Games.
Creating a Trade at Sell it Back:
Minimum trades are 10 items or £10 worth of stuff.
Sell it Back Review – Books they won’t accept:
anything without a barcode. Books must have an actual barcode, not just an ISBN/EAN number.
ex library books
books with significant written marks, stains, rips or mould
missing or loose pages
badly creased or damaged cover
missing dust cover
What Sell it Back do with rejected items:
Rejected items won’t be returned, but they will either offer you a reduced amount or ‘recycle responsibly’.
Sell it Back delivery mechanisms:
Delivery is by free home or work collection if you have at least 60 items, or use the free shipping label emailed to you and drop it off to a CollectPlus store.
Getting Paid by Sell it Back:
Payment is said to be within 7 days, directly to your Bank or Paypal.
Or you can choose to get paid extra by accepting a voucher to spend at their partners, Awesomebooks.com.
Bonuses & Offers at Sell it Back:
I am not aware of any special offers or bonuses available at Sell it Back
My Experience with Sell it Back:
I’ve only completed one trade with Sell it Back so far. This is how it went.
Deliveries have to be sent in boxes up to 10kg, so you have to split the load if you have more than that. Their system is supposed to automatically calculate the weight and send you enough labels for the number of boxes required, but I was only sent one when I needed two. The ‘request an extra label’ facility didn’t work for me, so I contacted customer support and they emailed an extra label very quickly. Good support.
One item was rejected as damaged and there was a mix up over the amount taken off my payment. This was resolved quickly when I queried it.
The process from beginning to end took 2 weeks:
14/1/21 trade created. 25 books for £8.87. I dropped them at collect+ the next day.
20/1 – received an email to say the items had arrived.
Checked account 25/1 and found the amount approved was down to £8.31. I checked the item list and found two books had been rejected as damaged. I was certainly not aware of any damage. It seems unlikely they were significantly damaged because we’re pretty careful with our books but I can’t check or prove anything in any case.
In addition, for some reason the account page also said that my actual payment was due to be £7.75, ie a further unexplained reduction. I sent them a query, to which they replied that it would be corrected.
28/1 paid £8.31 to paypal – so the error was corrected properly.
Sell it Back Review – in Summary:
My comparison of purchase offers from the various book buyers found that Sell it Back are at the lower end of the range in terms of both their prices and the number of offers they made. They offered on about 20% of my books, with an average price of 41p per book. Nonetheless, partly because they often offer on books the other buyers do not want, about two-thirds of the time their price is the best or only offer on a given item. Read more about this: Comparison of price offers received from online book buyers
Based on my own experience, Sell it Back’s systems need some glitches ironed out, though Customer Service did respond quickly and resolved my queries well.
