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This is a little overdue. Sent my first shipment the Thursday before Memorial Day. 67lbs. 16 different categories. Box was received on the following Tuesday. Processed on Wed. Shipping was only $24.92 from the Cape, and a check for $189.44 arrived on Monday. Such a simple process, and a great company to deal with.
How do I go about driving a shipment out , I've been saving a lot of e waste, and I'm planning on loading up my car I just bought and taking a road trip out to ohio.
Pick up boxes, load into vehicle, repeat till full. Turn ignition. Drive down the road. Stop for a soda an cheeseburger at your burger joint of choice. Repeat till at destination. Once there, turn off vehicle, unload, get paid, head home, or find a nice comfy hotel room an enjoy a day in OH.
Forgive me Kochy my friend, but I couldn't resist.
Sirscrapalot - I don't need led into temptation, I do just fine finding it on my own. - me.
Okay Wisescrapalot :P I was more so talking, like can I just show up or do I have to let them know I'm coming or what.
You do need to call or contact (email) them and set up a delivery time so that way there is not a semi there unloading the same time you are. That way an employee can devote time to properly weigh up your load.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kochy
Can somebody (ewasted or other) clarify the "computer plastic"? Is that drive faces, fan shrouds, case parts, etc?
Sent many hundreds of dollars up there last year, totally happy with results. Heading up to Ohio Sunday with an SUV full of stuff again. Good thing I've got family up there already. :)
I have to say for my first time shipment of e waste I am no less than super pleased with the staff of cfs. thanks yall cant wait to do it again.
I dropped off another shipment to be sent out Monday and just wanted to remind folks how awesome their chat feature is, I had to bug the poor folks twice this time with questions/issues and they were just super nice and gracious and super de dooper helpful as always even though I feel my questions were probably small/silly in the grand scheme of things.
My thoughts exactly. Great buyer to do business with.Quote:
Originally Posted by newattitude
I've shipped out a couple of loads. The first went very smoothly.
Ran into some problems with the second load. FedEx picked it up last Monday. On Friday i got e-mails saying that it had been received,processed, and paid out. The value recovered was less than expected so i logged in to view the report.
It [U]appears[U] that a fair amount of malware was loaded onto my pc when i opened the report. It was obvious so i shut everything down and cleaned out all of the nasties. It's pure speculation but my best guess would be that his system got hacked from outside and it exploited a weakness somewhere in my web browser.
Later ... i logged on with a hardened machine and didn't have any problems viewing the recovery report. It seems as though there were a couple of problem areas in the report:
Problem area 1: I sent in a package of CD/DVD boards that i didn't receive credit for.
Possible cause: Could be anything from human error to lost in transit.
Solution: In the future include a packing slip listing all of the items shipped.
Problem area 2: It gets a bit complicated with eproms,IC chips,old processors that aren't easily identifiable, and gold connectors. It's a judgement call on the part of the person taking the items in as to their value. It's a bit of a mystery as to what they're looking for and what the fair value of those items would be. There's potential for problems. If the person on the other end makes a bad call you could get burned. A bad call could just as easily end up hurting Mario's company if they over pay. Either way it's bad for everyone involved over the long run.
Solution: KISS it ! ( Keep it simple Sam)
Don't ship those items.
Just focus on shipping the things that are easily identified like main boards,memory,common processors, HDD boards, CD/DVD boards etc. Be mindful of your shipping costs per pound. If it costs 75 cents a pound to ship something but it only has a value of 20 cents a pound you're losing 55 cents a pound on that item.
Ship the higher value items and sell the lower value things at the local scrapyard when it makes sense to do so.
Bottom line: ewasted has an excellent reputation for customer satisfaction here. I'm impressed ...i'm trying to incorporate some of the things that i've learned from his example into my own business and step it up a notch.
This may just be a " One off " kinda thing. Mistakes get made and things go wrong sometimes. We don't know the whole situation.
It's better to focus on preventing problems and misunderstandings in the future.
Just curious..but did you separate the eproms, cpus, etc into bags, or smaller boxes? If not, that could explain your problem.
Whenever I ship to Mario an Co. I separate everything. Small items go in zip loc bags, or get rubber bands/zipties/etc to keep them together.
If you did, disregard. If you didn't, you may want to in the future. ;)
Sirscrapalot - I got quotes like Mario has ewaste!
I'm pretty careful about the sorting.
It does get complicated with the cpu's because some of the older ones are hard to identify. Here's just a rough example of how i do them:
1: aluminum cap, pinless, goes into one bag
2: Aluminum cap w/ pins another baggie
3: Green fiber , solder in type, another baggie
4: 386 & 486 another baggie and so on.
All of these individual baggies go into larger zip lock bag. That way when the sorter on the other end pulls it out of the box they know they're dealing with processors. For me: It gets complicated when i'm dealing with the older Mac main boards . There are a variety of solder in kinds that could be higher value but they're difficult to sort according to type.
The eproms and IC's are a bit simpler. Coarse leg eproms & IC's go in one zip lock bag. The fine leg IC's go in another zip lock bag. Both of those bags go into a larger zip lock bag so that when the sorter at the other end pulls it out of the box they know they're dealing with things that fall under the category of eproms.
To be honest, i don't think sorting was the problem. I weighed the big bag of eproms before i shipped them.The value recovered report listed the weight of eproms received on their end and we both were within 1/100th of a pound of each other.
The problem was the buy price. There was a huge difference between the buy price of eproms on my first order and the buy price on my second order. The reason for this is not clear ...................
I left a message for them listing my concerns late Friday but don't expect to hear back till sometime during regular business hours on Monday. I don't see how they could sort this one out once everything has been dumped into their respective bins at the other end.
I'll probably have to take the hit this time and mark it down as lesson learned for future reference.
Scrappah - " Trust but verify ! " ;)
Seems like with prices down across the board grading gets tougher usually in the favor of the buyer.....I am having to do this here locally if not I lose money and not in biz much longer.........The value of this stuff has been on a steady decline since I joined the forum........I just hope it does not drop any further or its time to find a new line of work
The issue is that buying and grading is done by averages. The supply of higher grade older material is decreasing, so the averages drop as well. Some are splitting up categories to make up for this, some are just dropping prices. These places have to stay in business, so if they're not making enough for themselves, they may just close up shop or stop buying certain material altogether. Then who is there to sell to?
One way to combat this is to diversify the sources of your material. If you just get material from say, public auctions, you're going to consistently have lower value material as these are normally newer but outdated systems.
Just a FYI if you sent p3 motherboards in the shipment with CD/dvd boards it's all classified as p3 motherboard. It happened to me I was like hey I'm missing 250# CD board but low and behold it was categorized with the p3 MB's
As long as the p-3's and CD/ DVD boards are paying the same it doesn't represent a financial loss but it's not a good way of doing things.Your customer shouldn't have to riddle out what you're doing. That creates confusion and promotes mistrust. They're left wondering : " Just what the heck is this guy up to ? "
This is just a new venture for me.I've been in the carpentry/construction business since 2001.The economy here is horrible. It's one of the worst environments for a new business startup in the nation according to Forbes. Well over 90% of our new ventures fail within the first five years.
If you're into e-waste you're working on a pretty thin margin here. Just one or two bad decisions could easily put you under.
It's just an opinion .... but in so many ways we are all in this together. If you have a good buyer look out for his/her best interests and help them keep them profitable where it's possible to do so. By taking care of them you're taking care of yourself.
If any buyer starts playing games with the categories that's bad for everyone .... the buyer included.
I see gold on the rise back up to 1281 as of this post!!!!..........I think if the value of the metal goes back up it will take care of all our problems....LOL
It's not just gold that we are recovering though. It's also platinum, palladium, silver, aluminum, copper, and maybe some other metals depending on what you're into.
Again ... just an opinion ... but i think that the real problem for many buyers & sellers is that the value (purchasing power) of the dollar has been trending downward for a long time now.
Just a hypothetical example: Let's say that in one year your profits go up by 10% but the purchasing power of your dollar declines by 20%
The net result is that you're making 10% less than what you did last year.
If you're running a business, and you find yourself caught between a rock and a hard place, there's always that temptation to shorten up either on your customers or your employees to make ends meet. It's not a sustainable practice because over the long run you'll lose both your customers and your best people that way.
If you send a bunch of small batches of items they tend to lump them into mother board category. And did you look into other E Waste buyers and see there prices? Usually it all works out in the end and you make what you estimate. Make sure you post what they responded to your list of concernes...
Thanks for the prompt hf. There was a bit of thread drift so i was going to bow out.
As i said in my intro i've been lurking / reading / studying here for months now. It's only within the last few days that i joined.There are a lot of buyers listed here and on the web. I've done a few deals with others and they worked out more or less okay.
Ewasted comes very well recommended and for good reason. It's a class act ! :)
The customer service is very responsive.
The shipping arrangements that they can provide for you are the best that i've seen so far.
There's a rapid turnaround time.
He posts his buy prices and updates them on a regular basis. It's pretty up front.
The pay outs are prompt.
I contacted customer service with my concerns and this was their final determination.
Issue 1: Not credited for cd/dvd boards.
As those here explained they were lumped in with the large socket motherboards. It's not like they didn't credit me for them. As a newbie it's just confusing when they combine things like that.
Issue #2: The Eproms:
We talked about that. The mix of Eproms,proms,and IC's that i sent out in the first load was similar to the ones that i sent out on the second load. The payout per pound on the second load was less than 1/10th of what it was on the first.
Customer service determined that the sorter on the first load had overpaid for the material that i had sent in.
Issue #3: I felt that they were being too picky when they downgraded the gold fingers that i had sent in. I'm a finish carpenter. I'm used to working within tolerances of + or - 1/32". The cuts were good with little or no green showing except for one.
Customer service offered to look into it but i asked them not to. It was just a small thing. The difference between 100% and a downgrade to 65% only amounted to a few dollars because it was such a small amount of material. It was not worth spending a lot of time on.
Issue #4: Sorting of the processors. I can't remember if i raised that issue or not with them. I know i raised it here. It would be too easy to get bogged down in trying to figure out what the older oddball solder in main processors are and what they're worth. The total weight of all the processors came out right so they probably got lumped in with something else. Maybe the green fiber capless ?
It's a small thing. It's not worth fussing over.
Anyway .... this is the Ewasted customer review thread. This is the review of my experience so far:
There were a few problems related to sorting and human error. ( It's not a perfect world.)
Overall, i would recommend Ewasted as one of the best buyers out there to deal with.