As the mobile phone industry has grown more and more expensive, one of the ideologies that are pumped out by those that would sell us these devices is around trading in your old phone.

The idea of offsetting the cost of your current handset in order to get your hands on a new one, is such an appealing sales technique that Apple themselves included a trade in section during the most recent launch of its iPhone 12 series.

But even then you won’t get a lot. You need an 11 series iPhone or the XS MAX in order to get more than £300 taken off the cost of a new iPhone, besting Samsung who will only shell out more than £300 for a device from the S20 range that was released earlier this year. Compare that with eBay where sellers would have you believe an iPhone 8 is worth over £200 and an iPhone XR (2018) can fetch £350 all leads to confusion in the second hand market, which means it’s a hard place to find the true value of devices. 

But one company is looking to bridge the gap between consumer expectations and manufacturers valuations. PreLoved Tech is a new company set up by TradologyUK that offers you a place to trade in Mobile phones, iPads or Laptops for them to securely sell on or recycle.

“Our Company is relatively new,” said Matt Giles, managing director of TradologyUK. “We established Tradology, the parent company, in 2019, and we’re a commercial and corporate recycling company mainly dealing with customers in the education sector. 

The PreLoved Tech side of the business was actually something that we’d have planned for 2021. We wanted to get a really good foothold in the commercial and corporate sector first, because that’s where the majority of my personal experience came from. But with coronavirus and many schools in lockdown, we had to look at what was the best thing to do to ensure the company carries on moving forward and continues to grow. 

As you can probably imagine, the schools and businesses that we were doing our recycling collections from all ceased and stopped. But what was really buoyant was the consumer recycling side which was always in our mind when we established the business, but we originally planned to launch after a couple of years of trading. 

We kind of expedited the plans at the start of this year to try to stay ahead of the game, knowing what was going on with the country and where the business was going. We started to work with a web developer relatively quickly, and we got PreLoved Tech launched a couple of months ago.”

 

PreLoved

Since its inception in September, PreLoved Tech has grown from strength to strength, with Giles adding that, aside from prompting an early entry into the market, the coronavirus has meant people are looking for new ways to save money.

“At Tradology, we focus on the telecom sector and we do a lot of work with companies who may rent their devices over a period of time and once they come back in they’ll recycle with us.  What we found is that this proposition is a bad way to deal with handsets within the commercial sector. 

We’ve seen the need and the awareness of recycling within the consumer sector grow massively, even more so over the last 10 months with coronavirus and I think tech recycling was always something that the corporate sector was focused on and maybe not so much with consumers. But I think with the way the world has gone since March, with people being furloughed or people losing their jobs, I think there’s been quite a big focus on how people can save money and how people can generate more money. 

So, we’ve seen a really sharp increase with our consumer business because people are being a little bit more savvy about what to do with their equipment. Where some people would buy a phone, use it for three or four years, upgrade and then leave it somewhere just in case they need a second phone or in case something happens. Now people are realising they’ve got this new device, they need some money and they’re looking at recycling it.”

 

Convenience

According to Giles, people are becoming more and more aware of the value they have in their old devices when they upgrade, adding that instead of handing them down, eBay and Facebook Marketplace are where a lot of devices go.

“What we basically see is that, when somebody purchases a new device, they’ll have a secondary device and there’s a couple of different options that they can use. They can either send it to somebody that they know, or they can try their luck with eBay and Facebook marketplace and stuff like that. 

I think it’s harder to sell things in that kind of way, mainly because you know you’re amongst a sea of other people and then you’ve got listing listing fees on eBay and you’ve got costs incurred for that as well. So by the time all your fees are paid you’re asking, how much money have you actually made? 

I think the benefit with a recycling company is mainly two fold. One, there’s no fees whatsoever to sell to a recycling company and you don’t even have to pay to get the device to us, and two is data protection. Just factory resetting your device won’t remove all your personal data, so that’s another plus point for anybody looking to move devices, but I think probably one of the most positive things for PreLoved Tech is the instance of it.

You can go on to our website, or go to Compare and Recycle, and get an instant price and sell it straightaway, no hassle, no fuss. You’ll get offered slightly less than you would if you sold it yourself, but I think that’s the kind of the business model, we have to bring in devices, we have to do all the testing relating to GDPR standards and then we have to refurbish the device as well to then sell them on. 

Our research indicates that people prefer a no hassle, quick way to sell a device. Yes, they might be able to get £20 or £30 more for it, or if it’s an expensive device maybe £50 or £60, but then you’ve got the rigmarole of photographing it, putting it on Facebook or eBay, dealing with the person at the end, paying to get it shipped out to the customer. It’s an inconvenience and I think we’re living a convenience-orientated kind of lifestyle and we provide a quick way of selling. Yes, they might get offered a little bit less than they would have directly, but it’s no hassle.

That’s why we see people using recycling companies growing so rapidly. Companies like us offer a no hassle service that is easy for somebody who’s at home to go to the website, get a quote, compare it to what they could potentially get if they sold it themselves, making the realisation that it’s not a massive amount of difference, and then getting the device collected and having the money the next day. That’s where we see our service being of attraction to customers.”

 

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