SwapTree: simple, easy online trading

If you're anything like the average consumer you have shelves full of used media; books, games, movies, and music.

It's possible that your collection even has a fine layer of dust settled across it in order to help you find your favorites faster. It's likely that a five-minute inspection of your shelves will reveal several items that you'd gladly get rid of if only you could get something worthwhile for them.

Unfortunately for many used games, movies and books, the amount of money recouped from selling on eBay and other sites is hardly worth the time and money you spend listing, packaging and shipping them but if you trade them using SwapTree.com you might be able to turn your trashy romance novels into a copy of Treasure Island.


SwapTree launched back in 2007 and has grown quite a bit in the past three years, adding new features and more users to make swapping your old books, movies, games and music for something new easier than ever.

Unlike many other trading sites, which focus on a single category like video games, the breadth of media available at SwapTree means you can trade for anything listed so long as someone has what you want. You can even do three-way trades, further opening up the possibility that you'll find something you want.

The site has a surprisingly large catalog of items to trade for, most likely because all the other users have as much unused stuff as you do!

When I listed Gears of War 2, an old yet enjoyable video game, for trade I was presented with more than 90,000 trade opportunities for everything from personal finance books to Wii games and a plethora of items in between. After finding a copy of Mary Party 8 owned by members who wanted Gears of War 2 I could then choose who I wanted to trade with based on the item's condition, location and trader rating.

SwapTree offers a toolbar for your browser that will let you know if the item you are looking at on Amazon, Half.com and many other sites and is available for trade right on the item's page making it more likely that you'll remember to check for swaps.

You can also import Amazon wish lists, text files and other online lists with built in SwapTree tools to make populating your "I have" and "I want" lists even quicker.

SwapTree is free to use; the only thing you have to pay for is shipping which is pretty cheap since you can ship most items using Media Mail service from the USPS.

To make it even easier, you can print postage off right at home, based on your items' weight in the SwapTree database, and drop it in your local mailbox. If you'd rather not deal with mailing anything at all use the location search to find trades in your city for instant gratification.

One of the few drawbacks to the service is its simplicity; as WalletPop pointed out last year you can't combine items for trade so you won't be able to offer three mediocre movies for a new release, all trades are one for one.

Even with this drawback SwapTree is a great way to get the best value for your used games, movies, books and music without a hassle and the SwapTree Tools make it easier to use than many other barter sites. Consider this blogger sold...err swapped!