Lehmann says Tiptop has cataloged around 50,000 specific products that it will accept in exchange. The company will accept things like your old phones, laptops and baby strollers, although some items are not eligible for exchange because it would be too expensive to ship them. (You can’t change your refrigerator, sorry.) Behind the scenes, Tiptop uses some algorithms to dynamically estimate the value of everything on your list based on market values and some adjustments for depreciation. The trade-in prices you will be offered will obviously vary. Lehmann says the average discount on all devices that have gone through Tiptop’s system so far is about $287.
Tiptop is enabled as a payment gateway for Shopify, meaning any online merchant using Shopify can enable Tiptop as a payment option. Already in the Tiptop cart are sites like Nothing and dad on the phonethe baby storage company According to the cribgame controller manufacturer Spineand christmas king—a store that sells exactly what its name implies. Merchants selling the item pay a fee to Tiptop just as they would to any other payment processor. That fee ranges from 5 to 12 percent, Lehmann says, depending on the value of the item being exchanged.
Labor union
The genesis of Tiptop began after Uber bought Postmates in 2020, when Lehmann says he took some time off to be with his family and consider what his life would be like after Postmates. It turns out the answer was very close to home.
“After a while I started thinking about how my house was full of stuff,” he says.
Not only that, but it was full of the kind of stuff he says is getting harder and harder to get rid of. Today’s consumer electronics often have very fast update cycles and companies try to breathless parkour its customers to buy the newest every year. And once you do, there aren’t always good ways to get rid of last year’s item you no longer need. Marketplaces like eBay or Craigslist require some momentum; You need to take photos, write an ad, post it, then interact with buyers, and ultimately ship it yourself or meet someone in a parking lot to make a transfer. Trade-in programs offered by manufacturers like Apple or Google are limited to products sold by that manufacturer, and sometimes there are conditions, such as committing to purchase another device or service plan, or just getting store credit. Instead of dealing with these limitations and hassles, people often simply store their old device in a box or drawer, where it is not used.
Lehmann sees all that stuff you have lying around as a resource.
“Simply put, what Tiptop is trying to do is give American households access to a bank account they didn’t know about,” Lehmann says. “If you want the newest, you need to do something with the old.”
It’s possible that Tiptop could help usher in a new era of device reuse, but it’s also possible the opposite could happen. Lucas Gutterman, director of the Built to Last campaign at advocacy group US PIRG, worries that helping people pay less for a newer device could prompt them to upgrade more often, perpetuating demand for that kind of cycle of upgrades. rapid update which, according to Lehmann, is part of the problem.