Gazelle Second Rotation, Inc. GAZELLE guarantees to rip you off-electronics trade-in Internet

I understand that things can happen in transactions, but would just like to say that when I sold my totally dead iPhone 4S to Gazelle, I was given a $75 quote.  I sent the phone to them and received a quick payment of the amount quoted to my PayPal account.  Totally no hassle at all!  It was a smooth transaction and I was able to recoup some money on a phone that took a dive into the toilet - literally!  I'd do business with them again in a heartbeat!

Im writing from Gazelles Customer Care team. Here at Gazelle, we pride ourselves on providing a great Customer experience and take it very seriously anytime a Customer does not feel we have lived up to that expectation.

Ive personally looked into this situation, and would like to provide readers with some information about how our service works as well as feedback about this particular transaction.

The way Gazelle works is that our customers trade in used electronics for payment. As part of that process, customers self assess their item online based on some criteria we provide, then ship the item to us using a pre-paid shipping label we provide.

Each item that arrives is then hand inspected by a trained member of our gadget lab team. Most items arrive as described online; however, on occasion there is a discrepancy either due to condition or model. In this instance, an offer is revised either up or down. It is our priority to provide an accurate offer- and last year we looked at hundreds of thousands of unique items and paid out tens of thousands of dollars above Customer expectations due to revising offers up.

In this specific case, unfortunately the customers original generation iPhone (iPhone 2G) did not match the customers assessed condition of perfect" when we checked it out. The way we define Perfect on the site is "no flaws and nearly identical to one that has just been taken out of the box." Due to this discrepancy, we regrettably had to lower their offer. When this happened, our system sent an email to the Customer with instructions that they had five days to decline the new offer and have their item shipped back to them free of charge, otherwise we would pay them the revised amount. We also sent a reminder email at 3 days, and at 1 day, repeating the reason for the value change and the option to decline the new offer. I have looked into this and personally confirmed that all three emails were successfully sent to the email address provided by this Customer, and that when they did not decline the new offer, we completed payment to them and proceeded processing their item. At this point, despite our best efforts we could not return the item because it had been listed for resale and sold to extend its life through reuse.

Our team shared all of this information with the Customer, but they remained dissatisfied and clearly quite frustrated. This is not the way we want anyone to feel, so on October 31st we offered to pay the small difference between the original and revised offers.

We know that revised offers can create a disappointing Customer experience, which is why we've built in the email reminders to help with the communication. We're also constantly working to give customers new and better tools to self-assess their items. For example, soon well be adding sample condition photos, a 'wizard' style helper to aid in item rating, and changing the language on the self-assessment to make it less subjective. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers to make new innovations and improvements and were always open to receiving your feedback at customercare@gazelle.com.