Sell or Ship Test Strips from Wisconsin — Find a Buyer

One: is the seal intact

This is first because it is the fastest to check and the most common reason a parcel comes back. The box has to be factory-sealed and unopened, in its original packaging. If somebody has already broken into it to take out a strip or a sensor, it is finished — not worth less, worth nothing.

The reason is verification. Once a box has been opened, nobody further down the chain can establish what happened to it, how it was stored, or whether the count inside is still what the label says. That uncertainty cannot be priced, so it is not.

This also means you should never open a box to photograph what is inside it. If you want a record of what you sent, photograph the sealed box with the expiry date and lot number readable on the outside. Opening it to prove its contents destroys the thing that made it worth proving.

Two: what does the date say

For test strips, the date is close to everything. In date with six months or more remaining is what you want. Under six months and the tier falls away quickly, because the person who eventually uses the box needs enough time to get through it. Past date, a strip is not saleable at all.

That last point is not a commercial judgement. A strip that has degraded can return a false blood glucose reading, and acting on a false reading is dangerous in a way that saving a box is not worth. Those genuinely belong in the bin.

Here is where the most-read guide on this subject gets it wrong, and where Wisconsin sellers clearing out a cupboard lose money without knowing it. That article states flatly that expired supplies have very low or no resale value. Two named items are exceptions, both bought past date at a reduced rate: Omnipod pods in the 5, DASH and Classic versions, and Dexcom G7 sensors.

Do not stretch that further than it goes. Expired Dexcom G6 sensors are not bought. Expired Libre sensors are not bought. No expired strip is bought. It is two items, and if either of them is sitting in your pile past date, pull it out before the rest goes.

Three: how did the supplies get to you

Supplies obtained through a government-covered program cannot be resold. This is the check that disqualifies a box even when everything else about it is perfect, so it is worth doing before you go to the trouble of packing anything.

It is about the funding route and nothing else. If the supplies were bought retail, or came through private insurance, or were passed on by a relative who paid for them privately, the sale is straightforward. Nobody will ask you to justify how you came to have them.

A pharmacy label with a name printed on it is not a problem and does not need removing. People assume it is the giveaway that stops a sale. It is not — it says nothing about which program paid for the prescription.

If you are clearing a house and genuinely cannot tell how a particular box was funded, ring 518-278-6008 and ask rather than sending it and finding out afterwards.

Four: what have you got, and how much of it

The brand on the box sets the tier. On the strip side that means FreeStyle Lite, Contour Next in all versions, Accu-Chek Guide, Aviva and SmartView, OneTouch Verio and Ultra, and True Metrix. On the sensor side, Dexcom G6 sensors and transmitters, G7 sensors and receivers, and FreeStyle Libre 1, 2 and 3 — Libre in US retail versions only, since sensors bought abroad cannot be resold here.

Omnipod 5, DASH and Classic pods are bought as well, pods rather than controllers. Some sealed Medtronic and Tandem components are too, and those are worth a call rather than an assumption in either direction.

Two things about quantity that people consistently get wrong. A 100-count box is worth meaningfully more than two 50-count boxes of the same strip, even though the strip count is identical — so if you are choosing what to send, send the larger boxes. And ten or more boxes earns a better per-box rate than the same boxes sent piecemeal.

You do not need to sort anything. A mixed lot of different brands, strips alongside sensors alongside pods, is quoted as a single lot. Separating it out costs you an evening and gains you nothing.

Five: agree the number, then post it

Get the figure in writing before the parcel leaves your house. Not a range, not an "up to" number — the actual figure for the brands, counts and dates you have described. A buyer who will not commit before you post is one who plans to revise it downwards once your boxes are in their building, and at that point you have no leverage left at all.

The label is prepaid, which means the postage costs you nothing from any of Wisconsin's 783 ZIP codes. Keep the tracking number. Payment follows within 24 hours of the parcel being received and verified, and verification is simply someone opening the outer packaging and checking the boxes against your description.

If the quote changes on arrival, ask for the specific reason and for photographs of what was received. Legitimate revisions have concrete causes — a seal broken in transit, a misread date, a count that differs from what you described. A vague revision is a renegotiation, and asking for the supplies to be returned instead is a reasonable response.

Where in Wisconsin this actually bites

Statewide, 11.4% of Wisconsin adults have diagnosed diabetes, marginally under the national rate of 12.1%. As usual, the average describes almost nobody.

Milwaukee reads 14.7%. Madison, the state capital and a university city, reads 7.4%. That is a 7.3-point gap between two of the state's largest cities — roughly one adult in seven against one in fourteen. Racine, on the lakefront south of Milwaukee, is 13.9%, which puts the whole of that southern industrial belt well above the state figure.

The rest of Wisconsin sits in between and does so fairly tightly: Janesville 11.8%, Kenosha 11.7%, Green Bay 11.5%, Oshkosh 10.6%, Waukesha 10.1%, Appleton 10.0%, Eau Claire 8.5%. It is a state of mid-sized cities and the figures behave like one.

The number that explains where sellable supplies come from is a different one: 19.6% of Wisconsinites are 65 or over. Most of what gets sent for sale is not bought to be sold. A prescription changes, a pump replaces a meter, somebody moves into care, or a family clearing a house finds a cupboard of sealed boxes nobody knew were there.