In this exclusive CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interview, Josh Guttman, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, and Oz Alvarez, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of SELLIT9, discuss how the company is transforming retail with its innovative trade-in platform, enabling consumers to turn unused items into instant store credit while helping retailers drive sales and support a more circular economy.
Drawing on Josh’s extensive experience in revenue leadership and business growth, alongside Oz’s expertise in technology, product development, and digital innovation, the co-founders share how SELLIT9 is making trade-ins simpler, smarter, and more accessible as the company expands across Canada and into the U.S..
You describe SELLIT9 as a way to turn “clutter into currency.” In simple terms, what does that mean for a shopper, and how does SELLIT9 Trade actually work from the moment someone decides to trade in something they already own?
“Clutter into currency” is a simple idea. Most people are sitting on hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars of value in things they no longer use. An old phone in a drawer, a laptop that got replaced, a tablet the kids outgrew. That value just sits there depreciating. SELLIT9 turns it back into money you can spend.
Here’s how it works: You are shopping with one of our retail partners, and instead of paying full price, you can trade in something you already own for instant store credit. What you own effectively becomes a new form of currency. Our platform gives you a guaranteed instant offer, powered by our real-time pricing engine. Most people take the instant route: you get the store credit right away and apply it to your purchase, with a temporary hold on your card that we release once we receive and inspect your item. If you would rather not have a hold, send the item in first and get your credit after. Then we send a prepaid label and your item goes to a reseller for a second life.
You pay less today, the retailer makes a sale, and your old stuff gets reused instead of landfilled.
A lot of people will assume this is just another buy now, pay later option at checkout. How is SELLIT9 different, and why did you design trade‑in to work alongside existing payment methods rather than compete with how people already pay?
I understand the assumption, but it is almost the opposite of buy now, pay later. With BNPL you are borrowing. You split a bill into payments you still owe, sometimes with APR, and a missed payment can add interest or fees. With SELLIT9 there is no borrowing and nothing to pay back. You are spending value you already own. Your old camera or phone or laptop is the money.
That is also why we built it to sit alongside how people already pay instead of replacing it. We don’t actually live at checkout. The trade-in happens well before you pick a payment method, or even add an item to the cart. The value of your old item brings down the price, or gives you extra purchasing power to add more. Then you pay whatever is left however you want, whether a credit card, debit, or even a BNPL plan. We are not trying to compete with Visa or anyone at checkout. We are lowering the amount that goes through them.
For the retailer that is the whole appeal. They keep their existing checkout and payment stack, and we simply give the customer more buying power on top of it.
Most people think of trade‑ins as upgrading one device for another, yet you are building toward “anything for anything” across categories. What are some of the more surprising items people are able to trade today, and what does it take on the tech side to price thousands of different products instantly and accurately?
People expect phones and laptops, and those are still the core. What surprises them is how far it goes beyond that. We already see things like cameras, gaming consoles, tablets, smartwatches, and premium headphones come through, and we are steadily opening up new categories. People have traded cameras and lenses for smartphones, gaming consoles for PCs, Apple accessories for another brand’s smartwatch accessories, etc. The long term goal is genuinely “anything for anything,” where the thing you trade in and the thing you buy do not have to be related at all.
Pricing that many products instantly is the hard part, and it is where our engineering lives. Every model has its own value that is constantly calibrated based on age, condition, demand, market announcements and what the resale market is actually paying. We built a pricing engine that pulls live market signals and combines them with the demand coming from our network of refurbishers and resellers, so the offer you see is a guaranteed offer, not a rough estimate.
Because the offer is guaranteed, we are the ones taking on the pricing risk. That forces us to be accurate at scale, across thousands of categories and models, every time.
You started the company after personal experiences with moving countries, junking valuable items, and seeing how much hidden wealth sits in people’s homes. In an environment where money is tight for many Canadians, how does turning unused items into instant store credit change what people can afford—and why do retailers want this without ever touching the traded inventory?
This came from my own life experience. I have moved countries more than once, and every time I ended up throwing away or giving away things that still had value, simply because there was no easy way to turn them back into money without the hassle of figuring out how to price them, list them, and the pain of dealing with buyers. Once you start looking, you realize almost every home is full of this hidden wealth. Drawers and closets full of things people paid good money for and now just sit around idle.
When money is tight, this matters. Turning an unused item into instant store credit means you can afford the thing you actually need today without taking on debt or waiting until payday. It quietly stretches people’s budgets using stuff they already own.
Retailers love it because we take the hard part off their plate. They never touch the traded item. We handle the pricing, the shipping, the inspection, and the network of refurbishers and resellers who give it a second life. The merchant simply issues the credit and we reimburse them. They get a new sale often higher than their average order value, a happier customer, and a real sustainability story, without any inventory risk or extra operations.
In just two years you’ve raised $6 million, helped over 4,000 Canadians trade more than 6,000 items worth over $2.4 million, and launched with 25 merchant partners and 100‑plus refurbishers as you move into the U.S. What does this funding change for the next year—especially around new categories and markets—and how do you and your co‑founder split responsibilities between revenue and engineering as you scale?
Those numbers are humbling, but also validate that the demand is real. People want this, retailers want this, and we have only scratched the surface of what is sitting unused in people’s homes.
The funding does two things. First, it lets us go deeper on the technology, expand our engineering team and push our real-time pricing into more categories, getting closer to that “anything for anything” vision. Second, it funds growth: more merchant partners, more buyers in our network, and a big push into the much larger U.S. market while we keep building here in Canada. The next year is about proving this works at scale across new categories and markets.
On the split, it is pretty clean. Josh runs the revenue side: merchant partnerships, the buyer network, customer experience, growth, and investor relations, everything that gets SELLIT9 in front of more retailers and shoppers. Oz runs engineering and product: the pricing engine, the logistics engine, and the platform underneath it all. We talk constantly, and while we challenge each other with lots of ideas, we trust each other to own our lanes. That is what lets a small team move as fast as we have.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
