As regular readers will know I have been trying out various internet-based options for boosting family income during the credit crunch. This week it’s the turn of Music Magpie. The first thing to say is that this site is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO WITH MONEYMAGPIE.

Why I’m so keen to stress that will become all to clear when you read on. As may recall I really can not be bothered faffing around, and my general rule is that the easier something is to use the more likely I am to use it. However I have met my limit with Music Magpie.

I may be all for the easy option but not when that means a 200% profit on a CD for the company and possibly as much as 1000% profit on DVD sales. To use the site you have to type in the DVD or CD’s bar code and the site tells you how much it will offer. I tried a few DVDs my son had grown out of The Best of Power Rangers and Transformer Robots and was quoted 37p and 30p respectively.

This didn’t seem worth while so I thought I’d try some box sets of Weeds I had. I was offered £2 for series three and only slightly more for the combined box of series one and two. Again this struck me as remarkably low for recent DVD releases which cost around £30 new, so I thought I’d see what the same DVDs were selling for on ebay.

Weeds series three was for sale at £20. But of course the true test would be if someone acutally bought it at that price. They did. So for the sake of a trip to the post office I got 10 times what Music Magpie would have paid.

Its not possible to buy DVDs on the Music Magpie site , but you can buy CDs on it so I thought I’d test that out. I was offered £2.11 for Nick Lowe’s The Convincer, while when I went to buy the said same CD it was offered at £5.99. So almost £4 of mark-up.

So, needless to say I will be selling unwanted CDs and DVDs on eBay and not handing outrageous profits – that would make even a loan shark blush – to Music Magpie.