If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this weekend, you’ll know that the iPhone has launched in the States, to general applause, love and drooling. As usual with the hyped launch of any new gadget, there’s been a rush of eBay-related stories; as far as I can see, these are about evenly split between iPhones going crazy on eBay and iPhones not going crazy on eBay.
What seems pretty clear is that there is plenty of supply: as of this moment, there are over 8500 phones for sale, and auctions seem to be ending around the $650 – $700 mark, hardly a huge profit on the $599 retail price. The days of sellers retiring on the profits of one desirable gadget are, I fear, over; though for the imaginative, there is still plenty of interest to be found. 
One seller who’s used the spin to his advantage, advertising his phone as $21 million Buy It Now or Best Offer, has had 138 offers… all of which he’s turned down. Russell Shaw called this “hey look at me marketing”, and I’m sure we’ll see plenty more of it in the future.
Then there’s the woman who paid $800 to be at the front of the queue so she could grab the store’s entire stock to sell on eBay… only to find that there was a one phone per customer policy. Oops. Always read the small print.
5 Responses
The £21,000,000 Best Offer has been removed….
Nah, it’s still there, I just had a typo in the link. Typo now fixed: sorry about that.
Now that video clip was funny 🙂
Now that is some funny *hit lol, phone looks ace.:-)
I was curious about whether they were really selling for lots of money on Ebay too, so I checked out some of the higher buy-it-now iPhone sales for about $1000 and it looked like the same 0-feedback “I just signed up today” Ebayer bought at least 3 or 4 of them. It looks like for whatever reason they are just trying to make it look like iPhones are selling for a lot of money – I have my doubts that they will actually be paying for all of them!