Article - How to make money from your Mobile Operator

UKViking

I recently made £120 profit from Vodafone, and I'll explain how. However, this only works for people who are not still within their mobile contract, and have high average phone bills.

As many of you know, when you get to the end of your yearly contract, you can upgrade and get a new handset often for free. The higher your average phone bill has been over the year, the more "discount" you get applied to a new handset.

This is kind of "cashback", but in the form of a phone, rather than money. Often, people get a handset for free, but they didn't go for the most expensive handset. Usually the most expensive handsets are not of huge interest to non business users. For example, the Nokia 6230 is very popular, but not as valuable as the business oriented Sony Ericsson p910i.

As I said, this doesn't work for everybody, but it's worth a go. Find out which are the most valuable handsets at the time and see if you can one of then for free. I found that I could get the Sony Ericsson p910i for free, which has a stand-alone value of £450 but I only wanted the Nokia 6230 (still an amazing phone), which has a stand-alone value of about £230. If you find you can get the more expensive one for free or nearly free, get it! It is like a bank saying to you, would you like £450? Or would you just like £230 sir?!

Now, all you have to do is sell it on Ebay and buy the handset you actually want from Ebay. And voila, you have got the cash value from the reward they offered you!. There are plenty of new handsets with full warranty for sale on Ebay all the time!

When selling and buying phones on Ebay there are a few important things to remember, apart from the obvious. Even though the Sony Ericsson costs £450 new in the shop without a contract, you will be hard pushed to get more than around £320 for it on Ebay. However, buying a phone on there will be cheaper too, so it evens itself out.

Remember that phones on Orange and T-Mobile are locked to their networks, so remember to state this. Vodafone and O2 phones are not locked. You can get your phone unlocked before sale and this might increase it's value.

To get an idea of how much you could sell a phone for, there is a way of browsing finished auctions on Ebay. I accessed this through "My Ebay" section.

There is alot of fraud going on on Ebay, one of which you are asked to send your phone to Nigeria. The best way to avoid this is to set the "buyer requirements" under your sale. You can set it to block buyers who are registered in another country, or buyers who don't have paypal etc. You can also request immediate payment on the auction, so anyone who doesn't pay immediately can't win the auction.

Remember a good auction relies on an accurate, honest description of the product, as well as good quality well lit photos, if you can.

One more important thing to take into account is that some operators require that you make at least one phone call on the new handset in order to "activate it". Failure to do this results in a £100 charge. I had to do this, but afterwards I just reset the phone to its factory defaults and stated in the auction that I had turned it on once to do this.

Well good luck, and let me know if it worked for you!

UKViking

I forgot to mention that you can still do this even if you are about to switch to another mobile operator, or end your contract! If you switch down to the cheapest tarriff and get rid of any extras on your account, then pay off 12 months line rental in one go (£180 in total), you will still profit from selling an expensive handset online.

Edinburghlass_2

I am moving this across to the Ebay and Auction boards as a more appropriate board.