My girlfriend gave me the ring from her first marriage and asked that I use it toward my purchase of her engagement ring. Are there .com sites that actually take trade-ins? Which are the best? thanks
While there are .com sites that buy stones from secondary sources, I don't know if any would deal with one stone. Besides, for obvious reasons, diamond wholesalers are not the most optimal people to be selling stones TO. For the prices they offer, for one stone E-bay would actually fare better though that is still pretty bad.
Here are some other options that might work.
Where are you buying the new mounting or having one made? If you are working with a smaller jeweler local to you, they may very well be willing to take the diamond in trade for mounting/setting/side stone cost/etc.
If the above doesn't work because you are buying the mounting online as well, you could simply keep it do a remount into a pendant or something else. If the stone doesn't have bad memories involved, remounts are very common.
Then again, I recently did a remount that involved turning an e-ring into a .45 caliber bullet with the diamond mounted as an expander core in the hollowpoint. I had a gunsmith put a very hot load in the cartridge, too.
So, I'm assuming bad memories were involved...
Most vendors would be interested to do a trade in,if you upgrade to a larger stone.
contact different vendors on line and see who gives you the best trade allowance towards your purchase.
A lot of on-line vendors will not take a trade-in if not originally purchased from them. I was in the same situation and asked many of the vendors. I ended up selling my diamond to Thingswebuy.com. You do not get the retail value for it but it was easy and stress free. I was happy with what I got for my diamond. Also if you send it to them and don't like what they offer, they will send it back to you. I was very happy with the overall transaction.