How To Buy Cell Phones At Substantial Discount

Its amazing how cell phones become obsolete within a few months. The technology is moving so rapidly and enhanced services are rapidly being released. More importantly there is a merging of technologies with PDA's, iPod's and the like rapidly taking on cell phone features. Besides this there are a continual supply of new and useful accessories.

Realizing that people are often trading in their old phones for newer models and because of the rapid evolution of technology, you can often pick up nearly new models at substantial discounts on places like eBay. The question arises, how can I beat out other buyers and still obtain substantially discounted prices?

With the large volume of cell phones traded on eBay everyday, a micro market (in economist terms) has appeared. This is a near efficient market. One can study the dynamics of this micro-market and determine some useful buying rules. With a little more information than the rest of the marketplace, one can almost certainly make some intelligent buying opportunities. This article focuses on how to identify these gaps and often purchase cell phones for 20-100% below retail.

This article should be read together with my longer piece and a web site, which produces the information required to identify buying nuggets. Find the links and URLs to these two sites at the bottom of this article. There exists a little web site that polls data from eBay throughout the day. Now what makes this different you may ask? Well firstly it only focuses on the demand for cell phones. On the left panel you will find categories for accessories, cell phones, entry level phones, midrange phones, smart phones , and a sneak peak at the newest latest and greatest.

There is one more aspect that makes this site useful. That is it holds information that is often more difficult for the buyer to obtain. With this information in hand buyers can often make more informed and better decisions and therefore avoid bidding wars and outsmart other bidders to a high degree.

Most information on eBay focuses on the selling element, i.e. how to sell your cell phones. I have tended to specialize on the buying end and trying to identify market opportunities and price in-efficiencies to really capture excellent deals. To do this we need to understand the dynamics of the eBay market place. Like any other market it is supply demand driven, and like a large flee-market if a buyer has knowledge of how many items are for sale at what prices and how many other buyers are in the market, then that buyer can capture the upper hand. Lets focus a little more on supply.

The eBay supply dynamic is a little different in that supply of an item must be seen at a point in time. In other words, because auctions end at different times, one needs to grasp the number of auctions ending in close proximity for the same item. This gives you a feel for the supply of items or in our case cell phones. What makes this interesting is that today there could be a large amount of auctions ending for a particular model, but next week there could be very few. This is one element driving the price.

The demand side is slightly more complex and hidden from the average eBay buyer. This is where that the web site I refer to at below has some useful data. Demand in eBay terms is measured (by sellers) as a number of factors - how many people view my auction, how many people ask questions, how many people place me on their watch page, and how many people actually bid. Obviously as we progress down this list the data become more reliable as an indication of demand. Page views are not easy to obtain, although some sellers place a publicly viewable counter on their auction pages. Questions and watchers are available to sellers, and the special web site mentioned below will expose this information. Number of bids is available for all to see.

Now if we happened to produce a graph as the auction progresses of the changes in the number of questions, watchers and bids one can easily see how the demand is changing as time progresses. Typically if questions are high and watchers are high, but bids are low, this may indicate some confusion (for example a spelling mistake in a model number) and a possible buy opportunity. If watchers are very high and climbing, but bids are low, this can point to a last minute bidding war, and a stay out indicator.

Armed with this information and also a quick summary of other similar auctions ending soon, plus a quick feel for the skill set of the seller and the current highest bidder, one can see a picture very different from the average eBay buyer. Soon the trained eye will observe some nice buying opportunities.

Its fairly easy to purchase a cell phone at a nice discount on eBay. Remember to check the carrier details carefully. One phone call and you will be able to find out if the phone is 'locked' in any way, and how you can unlock it. Also be very clear on the phone description and condition. As you probably know cell phones tend to wear badly and scratches and other dings are frequent. Often this is not an issue, but don't be surprised when your $200 cell phone which you paid $50, arrives in a little shabby state, if it works who cares.

By: Malcolm Silberman

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Article by Malcolm Silberman and Education Specialist trained by eBay, for a more lengthily discussion of this topic visit how-to-buy.brandnamegadgetbargains.com/how-to-buy-discounted-cell-phones and to see cell phones auctions with this value added data visit bargainbasementcellphones.com