BuyMyTronics.com

» see buymytronics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The founding story is one broken iPod. Brett Mosley repaired it, then started taking in other people's, and by the end of the first year in business in Denver there were two employees and about a thousand iPods fixed. The site was called BuyMyBrokeniPod.com. The New York Times wrote it up in November 2007 under the headline Broken Devices Get a Second Life, which is a generous description of a soldering station and a mailbox.

The name changed to BuyMyTronics.com as the inventory widened past iPods into phones, game consoles, Apple laptops and the general category of hardware made worthless by a newer model. The model was simple and it was postal. You said what you had, the site quoted a price, you shipped it for free, and a check came back. What arrived got repaired and resold if repair was worth it, and stripped for parts if it was not. Mosley's framing was that this was profitable and that it kept electronics out of landfill, and both halves were true at once, which is rarer in recycling than the industry likes to admit.

Mailing a dead gadget to Colorado and waiting for a check is a product of American postal economics. In Turkey the same device went to a repair stall, in person, inside a building full of repair stalls, and the price was argued out loud. That economy still works and it never needed a website, which is a large part of why mail-in buyback stayed an almost entirely American category.

~ the case file ~

~ what gamestop wanted ~

GameStop acquired BuyMyTronics on 22 March 2012, folded into a new mobile business unit announced the same week. The retailer's entire trade-in counter was built on used games, and used phones were the obvious next shelf. Its chief executive said at the time that the company saw a need to add technology resources to the emerging category, which in plain language means GameStop could not build the back end and bought one instead.

What it bought was the unglamorous half: pricing tables for thousands of model variants and a grading process that held up at volume. That was the asset. The brand was incidental, and the brand is the thing that got kept for three years and then dropped.

~ one week in february ~

The ending is bracketed to within six days by the archive. On 19 February 2015 buymytronics.com served its full storefront at about twelve kilobytes. On 25 February the same address served four and a half kilobytes, most of it one paragraph: the site had been fully absorbed into the GameStop online trade center and would no longer operate as a separate website, and customers could carry on trading in their devices at GameStop.com.

The notice carried no date of its own. Stripped pages ran through 10 April, then the host began returning redirects on 3 June 2015. Today buymytronics.com redirects to gamestop.com/trade.

~ the record is wrong ~

Wikipedia says BuyMyTronics was purchased in 2013 and files the company under 2013 disestablishments. Both are wrong. The purchase was March 2012, reported that week by the games trade press and dated to the 22nd in the deal databases, and the website outlived its own acquisition by almost three years. Whoever wrote the article collapsed a sale and a shutdown into one event, then filed that event in a year belonging to neither.

Eight years of taking in other people's dead hardware, and what finally ended it was an internal decision about which of two URLs should own the pricing page.

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