CowBoom.com is a new site that has been selling Best Buy returns and trade-ins on its own site and on marketplaces such as eBay for about a year. CowBoom's General Manager Larisa Hall said the site will launch in 60 days. Dealtree, which Best Buy acquired in 2008, has been incubating CowBoom as it built the infrastructure and staffed key areas (marketing, merchandising, category management and IT), and the company is now focusing on CowBoom's consumer experience.

Ms. Hall joined CowBoom in October, and said the site's business model is possible thanks to Dealtree's technology that allocates products intelligently to various channels, sending the best quality goods to CowBoom, and sending the rest to other platforms. Dealtree acquired its expertise over the past decade - it began helping retailers, distributors and manufacturers in 2001 get more for open box, refurbished and defective products by marketing individual items for sale through auction platforms like eBay, and other auction sites. BestBuy acquired the company in an effort to turn customer returns into a profit center.

Doesn't CowBoom compete with Best Buy? It's all about how to serve the customers, Ms. Hall said. She characterized the relationship as synergistic and complementary - and she sees CowBoom becoming a Top 500 retailer, and eventually a Top 100 retailer. (The company does not yet disclose sales numbers.) She plans to use traditional ecommerce marketing techniques to build the CowBoom brand - comparison shopping engines, search engine marketing and email marketing as well as mobile apps and more innovative techniques.

Ms. Hall runs CowBoom from its headquarters in California, and the company has over 900,000 sq. of warehouse space in Texas. Expect to see the site add information about trade-in opportunities in the near future.