At a time when more and more of resale activity is moving online, electronics resale chain PayMore is leaning into the value of physical locations.
The company is announcing today that its franchise partners will be opening 18 stores this month, and that it has development deals in place that will grow the chain to close to 600 stores within five years.
The chain grew out of a single secondhand shop on Long Island, in the New York City suburb of Massapequa Park, 20 years ago, to a franchise operator that is attracting global attention.
The first European PayMore opened in Luton, England, near London, last week, and PayMore’s co-founders met with potential franchisees from more than a dozen countries at the Franchise Expo in Paris over the weekend.
While PayMore also has an online channel, co-founders Erik Helgesen and Stephen Preuss Sr. say that having local stores were consumers can trade in used electronics for cash is key to their business model’s success.
They’ve learned, they said, that customers prefer to sell their electronics devices in person, and that they like having a clean, well organized, tech-supported store that will wipe their devices clean of personal data, and pays them immediately.
"The customer likes dealing with someone who is educated, someone that’s treating them fair, someone that buys a wide range of electronics and then they get cash on the spot - everyone loves that, Preuss said.
The stores buy and sell all kinds of electronics - or as Preuss puts it, “anything that you can plug in or put a battery in, we’ll buy it - From today’s hottest electronics to yesterday’s favorites to everything in between, we’ll buy it.”
PayMore co-founders Erik Helgesen and Stephen Preuss Sr. at a PayMore store in Raleigh, N.C.
The stores are supported by a proprietary tech stack developed by Helgesen that gives franchise operators real time information on what a device is selling for on the resale market, and what the store can afford to offer for it. The tech also makes it easy for local operators to resell the devices, either on PayMore’s online site, or other resale platforms, or in-store.
Preuss and Helgesen started out in the secondhand business in 2004 with a all-purpose secondhand and consignment store that accepted a wide variety of merchandise, They quickly realized that “we were making more money on electronics than anything else that was coming into the store,” Preuss said,
And customers told them repeatedly how much they appreciated having an option for selling pre-owned phones or laptops or other electronics beside trading it in at an Apple store or Best Buy or other electronics retailer.
They also saw an opportunity to create a better kind of secondhand experience, different than the cluttered, inefficient pawnshop-type experience, with clean stores in good locations, and trained staff who can complete a transaction within minutes.
“We’ve digitized most of the record keeping that needs to happen,” Helgesen said. “We’ve sped up the transactions nearly 600%,” from an average time of 50 minutes in a typical secondhand store to 6 minutes. Customers “are not awkwardly standing there to see what we are going to give them,” he said. “Our staff have pricing at pricing at their fingertips so its not something where they’re fiddling around, and trying to look at multiple platforms,” before they name a price.
“We have a repeat customer rate of about 75%, where the average in the secondhand world is about 7%,” Preuss said. “We’ve 10x-ed the experience and we’re just getting started.”
The tech platform PayMore has built also lets store operators check serial numbers and police alerts to spot stolen items being offered for sale, the founders said.
PayMore stores are designed to be a nicer alternative to traditional resale stores or pawn shops.
The relatively low cost to open and operate a PayMore store is fueling the demand for new franchise locations, Helgesen and Preuss said. The brand began offering franchises in 2020.
The franchise fee for a store is $35,000. Operators also pay a fee to use the tech platform, and a royalty fee on sales. Average startup costs are between $140,000 and $260,000, and the average store generates over $1 million in gross sales.
PayMore also is tapping into the sustainability trend by recycling devices that can’t be resold. The company is processing almost a million pounds of e-waste a year, and keeping it out of landfills, Helgesen said.
“We wanted to disrupt the secondhand world on the retail side and really be the specialist in electronics, especially the pre-owned side of electronics,” Preuss said. “We’ve combined brick and mortar retail with technology, data, and ecommerce.”
© 2025 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Joan Verdon, Senior Contributor at forbes.com
Joan Verdon is a veteran retail reporter based in Northern New Jersey.