Swap.com – An Online Thrift Store

This post is brought to you by Swap.com – Kids’ Consignment. All opinions are 100% mine.

I think I’m in love. No really.

I got an offer a few days ago to write an overview for ya’ll about  Swap.com – Kids’ Consignment. I almost passed it up because, frankly, the post budget was too small. But then I got to looking at it, and I thought, hey, I really like this site! So I pitched back, and well, here I am. Writing about swap.com.

See, I’m a thrift store shopper, but I live way out in the sticks, and I have two small kids to haul with me whenever I do get out to a thrift store. So it makes a lot more sense for me to shop online. But then, I can’t afford retail prices.

Swap.com is an online thrift store that makes pretty much the perfect website for buying kids’ clothes.

Buying through swap.com is a lot like buying from Amazon. All of the items are sent in by individual sellers to be inspected for quality control and then listed on the website. So you can fill up your cart and check out once, even though you may be buying things from a variety of sellers. And you end up paying 50-95% off of the retail price.

Did I mention that you can sell on swap.com? That’s what makes it SWAP.com, after all. The fee for sending items to Swap.com is $8.90, and it includes the shipping and listing of the items on the site. Swap.com then sorts, professionally photographs, and lists the items on the customer’s account. Then, the customer can price the items, and when they sell, the customer gets most of the proceeds. Swap.com only takes a $1+20% commission on sales. The sales proceeds are automatically paid to the seller’s Paypal account within 14 days. The items go to other families, and therefore Swap.com only accepts items that:

• are clean, do not have stains or dirt, and are odor and pet hair-free
• are like new or at least in good working order and are complete with all components
• can be shipped via UPS package service

Items sell really fast on Swap.com, and best of all, you can free up your storage space immediately. Because of low commissions and efficient logistics, sellers also get maximum value for their items.

For me, this is a lot easier than sorting, inspecting, photographing, and listing each thing on eBay. Even though I love eBay, and sell things there frequently, I haven’t had great success with selling clothing.

Another thing I love about swap.com is that they allow you to pay for items using credit that you’ve earned from selling items with them – making it a true swap.

I’ll be honest with you – I’m a reluctant clothing saver. In the interest of being thrifty, I have boxes of clothing the kids have outgrown, waiting to be passed on to the next child in line (who obviously hasn’t even been born yet ). But I really don’t like it. It takes up so much space, and well, I just like the excitement of having new-to-us clothing. All of this is to say that one of the things that excite me about swap.com is the possibility of being able to forego all that storing – and not feeling guilty about it!