In anticipation of a phone-swapping trend, eBay announced a two-week promotion on February 8 that guarantees at least $200 for select models of functional used smartphones on its Instant Sale platform. For some phones, eBay is offering a price more than $100 higher than Verizon's trade-in value.
It looks like the anticipated wave of resellers will pan out. Three days into the promotion, 130,000 eBay site visitors have requested offers for used smartphones. It's too early to tell how many of these will actually send their phones to eBay in order to actually redeem the offers.
Most of the offers have been for used iPhones, and various models of the phone have taken six spots on the list of the top ten most requested offers during eBay's promotion. BlackBerry and Android phones split the remaining four spots.
This iPhone majority doesn't necessarily indicate that AT&T is experiencing a mass exodus in favor of Verizon. Android phones only started outselling iPhones in the first quarter of 2010, which means there are more of them out there to resell. There's also a possibility that eBay's offer guarantee prompted the rush to resell old phones on the site rather than the Verizon iPhone launch itself.
Even so, the interest in selling even the latest model of the iPhone (early adopters of the iPhone 4 still have more than a year to go to finish their 2-year contracts) must be less than comforting to AT&T.
