How We Buy Your Broken Phones

At The Big Phone Store we happily buy your old electronics so that we can refurbish them and sell them on so that they get a second, third or even fourth life.

Pricing

When purchasing your old phones we have certain criteria we look for in order to evaluate pricing. We inspect these phones, their internal and external conditions and match them against our criteria which we have labeled:

• Brand New
• Good
• Poor

As a result, the prices we offer for these phones are a flat rate and we happily pay the full amount if your old device matches the criteria. A list of the criteria is linked below
https://www.thebigphonestore.co.uk/more/terms-and-conditions

This slightly changes when we buy back your broken phones. As we have no way of guaranteeing what issues may come with a broken phone, we offer an ‘up to’ price.

Explaining ‘up to’ pricing

We cannot predict the issues to be found in a broken phone and therefore we do not offer a flat price. Instead, we offer an ‘up to’ amount. The ‘up to’ amount is based on several factors, such as labour costs, marketing, postage, etc. ‘Up to’ amounts also consider the number of faults we could potentially find in a phone, and some issues cost more than others.

For example, we could accept two Samsung S7 Edge in broken condition and discover one needs a new back cover (cheap to replace) and the other needs a brand new LCD (expensive to replace). Or in another instance, one phone has one fault and the other phone has two. This is then reflected in the ‘up to’ price and we would most likely buy both but pay a bit more for the one in need of a new back cover (or single faulted device) as it is significantly cheaper to repair.

When we buy a broken phone we base the price on:

Before being sold/repaired 

• Marketing costs
• Postage before it gets into the building
• Number of faults (more faults = generally more expensive)
• Labour costs
• Software used to test

Being Repaired and Sold

• Cost of the part(s)
• Labour (board level repairs are complicated and even the most highly skilled engineers can only repair 2-3 per day to a standard suitable for resale)
• Postage
• Further marketing fees
• Payment gateway fees

Because of all these factors, we offer an ‘up to’ price to help represent a guideline price. While a ‘brand new’ or ‘good’ condition phone can have fewer issues, a broken phone can have one issue or tens of issues; which is why we do not offer a flat price. We must first assess the phone and value how expensive it will be for us to fix and then offer you our final price.

We do not pay for phones that:

• Have had previous repair attempts. We do not know what issues a previous repair may have caused and therefore do not accept them. However, we do consider phones that have been quoted repairs but have not been attempted.
• Phones with extensive liquid damage. If you have dropped your phone in liquid and fear severe damage DO NOT turn on the device. Instead, leave it turned off and seek repair help immediately for the best chance of device recovery. A liquid-damaged phone is essentially destroyed (especially once being switched on).
• ‘BER’ devices. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. This means we will not buy a device that will cost us more to repair than what we can sell on for, once repaired

However, we do buy most of the devices brought in to us, in fact, we buy 95% of

 the broken phones that are brought into us for refurbishment.

Even if your broken phone is ‘BER’, we will consider buying it for it’s external/interior parts which we can use for other refurbished devices. This depends entirely on the make and model of that individual phone.

Here at The Big Phone Store we see value in refurbishment and as a result, we pay more than any other repairer for your old devices. This is because our management has over 30 years of experience in repairing and refurbishing, so we see the value in everything.

Additionally, if you send your phone to us and you’re not happy with our offer, we will send the device back to you free of charge, as long as it’s eligible.