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Good Housekeeping Reports: Freebies are a click away at virtual swap meets
The Salt Lake Tribune - 10/20/2010 by Staff

A quasi-cashless society has cropped up on the Internet in the past couple of years that enables users to swap for all kinds of great goods.

If you’re willing to pay for shipping, you can find almost anything ­— from the first season of “Heroes” on DVD to Old Navy clothes for your kids ­— all either new or gently used, and all free.

Swapping also creates a fun and relatively stressless way to get unwanted stuff into the hands of a grateful recipient.

Here’s a look at some of the biggest and best sites where you can swap safely and some extra precautions you can take:

Entertainment » Swapadvd.com, which was given the thumbs-up by the Good Housekeeping Research Institute for its ease of use, can be a movie maven’s best friend. Register for a free account and decide which of your DVDs you want to swap. You must have the original cases; use the UPC codes on them to easily list your DVDs.

When someone wants one of your DVDs, you mail it out. When the other person indicates receipt of your DVD, you get one credit per disc deposited into your account. On a recent visit to swapadvd.com, 196,608 DVDs were available for swapping.

Swap.com lets its members trade books, movies, music and video games for free. With 3.5 million items up for swapping, it’s no wonder it gets high marks for selection.

Unlike on other sites, where you have to earn points in order to start trading, on swap.com you make one-for-one trades or three-way trades, and can start as soon as you sign up. The site does its matchmaking to find you a swap partner, saving hours of potential Web-surfing time.