Why selling your own laptops is a terrible idea

    Data and security.

Having a third party such who can handle the data wiping of your drives is super important! Wiping them past NIST standards is key, and having a Certificate of Destruction issued by the third party absolves your team from future liability around either company or employee information. The recent fines (60M!!) for a data breach show how serious the OCC is fining for these mistakes. Time is also a factor, as it can take significant time for an IT team to do this work, and a rushed job is a bad job.

  Who Sells the laptops?

The accounting over selling 50 laptops online is ridiculous, and who receives this money? Who pays taxes on the money coming in? your IT staff that is selling it? The sales can take months of your time, even for just those 50 old laptops you spent a week scrubbing those goofy stickers off of. For your accounting to be easily handled, getting one big check from a buyer is much easier, and you can plan how to offset this cost accordingly. Typically your upper level local ITAD team will have some options to donate to your local school, YMCA, or other organization, so you can really do some good with these funds, rather than take up your IT and Accounting teams time.

You don't even make that much!

Fair market value: Your company typically won’t be able to offer a year warranty for the equipment online, which means you will be losing almost a third of its perceived value by selling it “as is”. When you cost your equipment using E-Bay, push that little button on the left to see examples of As Is sale (typically almost 1/3 less!!) Fair Market Value is dramatically effected by this, and is really the true number you need to look at when considering selling your own equipment online easily. Having a warranty is a big deal for many people buying assets.

 Responsible E-waste disposal

Working with a third party to dispose of your extra old IT Equipment, such as monitors, can be costly, and to do it in a green fashion is something all responsible company (s) need to handle well. To sell those laptops to a company that also handles your E-waste means you are offsetting all those E-waste costs This also can also be used effectively as a number to offset your carbon footprint, leading to a really sustainable cycle of IT waste. Currently 90% of E-waste in the US is exported to China and Nigeria. Do you compost at home? Do you sort your garbage? Sleep well knowing your team is doing the same at work to not pollute our fragile environment.

 Who you should use

When evaluating who to go-to, the decision is simple: work with the responsible, responsive team. I work at Northbay Networks, Northbay Networks has been in global IT Asset liquidation here in Emeryville since 2001, and our strengths are in purchasing assets such as laptops, servers, monitors, and other items. Whether it’s a hardware refresh, office departure, or a data center decommission due to a move into the cloud, our team can provide the logistics, purchasing power, and data destruction that you need here in the US or abroad.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more. #ITAD #ewaste #macbook #ITAM

Please do reach me to find out more. Josh Thomas [email protected]