NextWorth

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

~ the obituary ~

There are two dates on this one and they are two years apart. The Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth signed NextWorth Solutions' certificate of dissolution in June 2019. The website went on answering until August 2021, and the Internet Archive's final clean capture of nextworth.com is dated 11 August that year. Somewhere in between, a dissolved corporation carried on serving a storefront with nothing behind it.

It started as a student project. David Chen, Andrew Walsh and Scott Richardson were at Babson College when NextWorth was picked for the 2005 Business Hatcheries program, which handed free resources to startups run by students. The first business was not trade-ins at all: it helped companies and nonprofits get their used luxury items ready for online auction, in exchange for a cut between twenty and thirty three percent. In spring 2006 they threw that out and became an electronics buyer instead, and in January 2007 raised a first round of $1.5 million.

Write the mechanics down, because the whole industry still runs on them. You described your device in a web form and got a quote back, then had thirty days to put the thing in a box with a prepaid label on it. NextWorth wiped the memory and inspected the device, then paid you within fifteen days. If the inspection came back at a lower condition than you expected, you could demand an explanation or have the device shipped back to you. About eighty five percent of what came in got resold, often into countries where a new iPhone cost far more than a used one, and the rest went out to recycling partners.

Turkey had the same demand and none of this apparatus. Selling a used phone here meant the second-hand market or the shop on the corner that handed you cash and asked no questions about the battery, and the price depended entirely on your ability to argue. An American with the same old phone got a quote off a web form and a published policy to point at when the appraisal came back low.

~ the case file ~

~ the counter at Target ~

The retail side is what made NextWorth visible. A pilot with Target began in 2009 and grew into in-store trade-ins where you were paid on the spot, which solved the real problem with mailing a phone to a stranger: you had already given up the device before you saw the money. Verizon put an e-waste collection program together with them. Lenovo's online trade-in ran on NextWorth underneath. By late 2012 it was described as one of the best known trade-in services in the country, while handling only a small slice of the total traffic, a measure of how much volume the carriers and the manufacturers were keeping for themselves.

~ the squeeze ~

Nothing dramatic appears to have killed it. The trade-in business got absorbed by the companies on either end of it. Apple and Samsung built the credit straight into the checkout flow, and the carriers started using it as a subsidy mechanism, which left an independent quoting prices on a web form competing against the brand that made the phone.

Resale forum threads from the period are full of disputes about downgraded appraisals, which is an occupational hazard rather than a scandal. Any business built on remote inspection of other people's property generates the same complaints.

~ two years of nothing ~

Two years and two months separate the dissolution filing from the dark website. A state had already recorded the company as finished in June 2019, and the archive shows a site still serving pages through 2020 and into the summer of 2021. Nobody announced anything. The domain was simply still paid up, and then it was not.

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