‘Lion’s Share’ of uSell Traffic is From iPhone, Android Phone Users, COO Says
About 40 percent of traffic to uSell.com is coming from consumers on mobile phones, and the “lion’s share” of that are iPhone and Android smartphone users, Chief Operating Officer Nik Raman told us at Pepcom’s Digital Experience in New York Thursday. So the company made sure to “optimize” its new mobile website for iPhones and Android phones, he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The mobile site is “not optimized for tablets yet,” but consumers are still able to use it with iPads and Android tablets, Raman said. It’s “trying to get to some of the other devices” for optimization, but the goal was to go for the “low-hanging fruit” for now, he said, referring to iPhones and Android phones.
The company’s usage data showed that Windows phones are a “big also-ran” so far among consumers looking to trade in their devices, Raman said. He conceded that devices being traded in at uSell.com now tend to be at least a year old, so it will take another year to see if there’s any significant uptick in consumers looking to trade in new Windows mobile devices such as Microsoft’s coming Surface tablets.
The “vast majority” of devices that consumers are looking to trade in at uSell.com continued to be mobile phones, Raman said. The number of devices traded in via uSell.com grew “five times” since January, he said. Devices other than mobile phones -- mainly tablets and MP3 players -- made up less than 5 percent of all devices traded in via uSell.com, he said.
Upstream Worldwide’s division now has nine recycling partners featured at uSell.com, where users of the site can get price quotes for trading in used phones and other devices, Raman said. That’s after it added TradeInSpot and CashMyCellphone to its partner portfolio, he said. USell expects to grow that to 15 partners “in the next couple of months,” he said. There have been an unspecified number of recycling partners who uSell stopped doing business with, a “couple of them” after feedback indicated that they weren’t providing a high enough level of service, he said. He didn’t name them.
"We haven’t made much progress” since April in convincing partnering third-party buyers of used devices to become R2- and e-Stewards-certified recyclers if they weren’t already, Raman said. He told us in April that such certification was “going to be an evolution.” He predicted Thursday that it is “probably going to take some time” to achieve that.