Broken Stuff selling on Ebay ?

[J4CKO]

How come broken items go for so much on Ebay, sometimes not far off or the same as a working, having a clear out and was about to tip a faulty Toshiba 40 inch tv, quick look on Ebay shows they got for £40 or so and it saves me a trip to the tip.

Who is buying all this stuff ?

[Spare tyre]

Lots of reasons

People assume eBay is cheaper
Might want a specific part
Get carried away with bidding


I paid my way partly through university selling Tesco items on eBay, then going into Tesco and buying them when someone purchased them from me on eBay

Removing the tags tripled the value in some cases, this was the early days of eBay mind

[iva cosworth]

But watch out for the idiots who turn round and say it's broken when you've clearly stated it in the ad.

[soad]

The borked stuff sells because people like to take things apart, not because I expect they can fix them...

[Timmy40]

Spare tyre said:

Lots of reasons

People assume eBay is cheaper
Might want a specific part
Get carried away with bidding


I paid my way partly through university selling Tesco items on eBay, then going into Tesco and buying them when someone purchased them from me on eBay

Removing the tags tripled the value in some cases, this was the early days of eBay mind

Like it.

I too am a bit bemused as often people seem to overpay on fleabay. But each to their own, and after all you have the satisfaction of "winning".

Some thing are cheap though, like auto parts because you can get at the components at source i.e. HK/China, so if you are prepared to accept a 3 week wait for the part you can save a lot.

[CountZero23]

I'm assuming then tellies that sell for a bit have a known issue / weak point which is fairly cheap to fix when it goes pop.

Wasn't there roaring trade in old XBoxes which were pretty easy to sort and all tended to go wrong in the same way?

As others have said allot of people get caught up in the bidding, can see that on a car though not a broken TV. Each to their own...

[CR6ZZ]

Yes, the mind boggles. I advertised a cell phone in the web a few years back. Was totally up front and said I had dropped it in the sea. Still got $70 for it.

[tilley441]

people do insurance jobs on broke tvs, pay £2-300 for a broke 4k curved and then claim and sell back on eBay. nothing you can do to prove thats why they buy them though

[goneape]

No idea but if they want to pay me to take my crap away, that's fine by me. Example: Fridge/freezer broke down a little while back, it was beyond economic repair (parts, call out, labour, VAT etc) so I replaced it. Rather than pay AO £15 to take it away, it went on ebay as a snap 3 day auction. Sold for £30, so all in about £40 up. My guess is it was bought by one of those second hand appliance shops, who can fix it for parts cost only and sell it on for £100 profit maybe.

[eliot]

I bought a huge old office multi feeder photocopier of ebay for £1 - for no other reason to take it to bits with my lad. £1 for a whole afternoon of messing around and big box of bits and bobs for future projects.

[spunky-mon]

A lot of the time people throw out TV's as they start intermittently not switching on, often not switching on at all. Nine times out of ten this is down to dry solder joints on the internal power module, 10 minutes work will have this sorted.

I suspect the people buying these TV's know about this and are hoping this is going to be a cheap fix and quick sell. A guy at work has the man at the local skip keep all the tv's that people are throwing out and usually manages to fix them as this is the issue. Its a good little earner if you can be bothered (I can't)

[Morningside]

I used to sell loads of stuff on eBay as spares/repair (Business) and it's surprising who buys what. I had someone who would just buy broken Sanyo projectors. Everyone has their little market.

I did sell about 40 hand held computers as spares / repair as I could not get any data on them. Someone purchased them all and when I told them I could not get info he said "We are ********* company!".
They either got them all back as internal spares OR don't like their products out in the wild so they can keep their prices high.

[northwest monkey]

tilley441 said:

people do insurance jobs on broke tvs, pay £2-300 for a broke 4k curved and then claim and sell back on eBay. nothing you can do to prove thats why they buy them though

I've seen this happen at a proper auction so it's not just Ebay. Tellies with cracked screens / dead pixels going for good money & then fixed under warranty or an insurance claim. The daft thing was, the insurance companies once they'd paid out put the broken TV back into auction and the whole thing started again. I can't imagine there being a national database for TV serial numbers like there is for car registrations, so the chances of getting caught seem pretty slim...

I know a lad that used to buy faulty vacuum cleaners by the pallet load (think it was Dyson). They were all new & still in boxes but were catalogue returns. He said that 90% of the time it was a faulty on/off switch that just needed fixing. Like anything though, it's knowing which bit to fix!

[davhill]

Sometimes, spares or repair ads have usable items. For example, my Dremel tool's field coil has shorted out. On these devices, it is often the speed control switch that dies. Mine is fine, so you can figure out why I'm looking for a dead Dremel.

[StuntmanMike]

I bought my youngest a broken camera at a car boot, it cost two quid, I then bought another broken one off ebay for 15 quid, this morning I combined the two and now she has a working camera, its a cannon compact thing, would have been quite pricey new, one had been dropped but had a working lens, the other had a knackered lens.

The original car boot purchase was just for a plaything, shes only 8, but I just got to wondering if I could make it work again.

I have done this with Iphones and the like and always knackered them.

[wibble cb]

used to buy hard drive ipods for cheap on ebay, quite often they weren't borked, the were just hibernating.....many people did n't realize this!

[J4CKO]

Well, it was on for a few hours and a guy said he would give me £40 for it, nice chap turns up in a VW minibus with a loads of kids and dogs in, bonus was his missus had a very impressive but not very well contained chest.

[egroeg]

I bought a broken projector for 30 quid (optoma hd70). It was advertised as having a broken bulb but unfortunately it was the colour wheel.

Turned out you can't get them any more (except great expense),so I bought another for 30 odd and combined them.

Ended up with a working hd projector, two bulbs and a spares box for 60 quid,so not too bad.

This was partly luck though!

[wack]

I once bought a spares or repair Fuji S2 digital SLR for £25

When I got it , it was more spares than repair so I thought I'd take it apart to see how it worked, it was based on a Nikon film camera and all they'd done was fit a sensor over the film window, it even had the film spool indents in it

When I'd finished I had a box of Fuji bits and about 100 screws

I stuck it all in a box, took a picture then stuck it back on eBay as spare parts where it made £60

Bizarre

[wack]

I once bought a spares or repair Fuji S2 digital SLR for £25

When I got it , it was more spares than repair so I thought I'd take it apart to see how it worked, it was based on a Nikon film camera and all they'd done was fit a sensor over the film window, it even had the film spool indents in it

When I'd finished I had a box of Fuji bits and about 100 screws

I stuck it all in a box, took a picture then stuck it back on eBay as spare parts where it made £60

Bizarre

Edited by wack on Sunday 16th August 21:22