How Does Boomerang Buyback Compare?


Boomerang Buyback is the latest site that offers to buy your old mobile phones and other electronic gadgets. It claims to offer the “highest payouts”, but how do its prices really compare to rivals — or to selling it yourself on eBay?

We’re fans of selling off your old phone or tablet if it’s in working order; indeed, that can be a useful strategy for upgrading without spending too much money. However, our previous investigations have suggested that for some categories of devices, most notably the iPhone, selling via eBay can get you more money than using a buyback service.

The launch of Boomerang Buyback seemed like an opportune moment to revisit that issue. So we sought quotes from the site and its main local rivals (Cash For Phones, Cashaphone, Mazuma, Money4Mobiles and Regadget). (Boomerang Buyback has effectively replaced the local outpost of BuyMyTronics, while Mobile Blitz appears to have disappeared altogether.) We also checked out recent successful sales on eBay Australia.

We looked at two models of phone: Apple’s iPhone 4S (64GB) and Samsung’s original Galaxy Note phone (the N7000). In both cases we assumed the phone was in excellent condition, and still had its box, charger and all other accessories, though sites don’t factor that into their selling price in a completely consistent way. This is what we were quoted:

Site iPhone 4S 64GB Galaxy Note N7000
eBay $520.00 $350.00
Boomerang Buyback $408.00 $244.00
Cash For Phones $213.39
Cashaphone $350.00
Mazuma $294.00 $238.00
Money4Mobiles $380.00 $250.00
Regadget $302.49 $247.22

Those prices do suggest that Boomerang Buyback is a solid choice if you want to simply sell off your phone. It had the highest price for the iPhone 4S 64GB model, and was only beaten by Money4Mobiles with the Galaxy Note. Boomerang Buyback also offers more gradings for item condition than Money4Mobiles, so in practice you might find this handset going for a slightly lower price with the latter. We were somewhat surprised that Cash For Phones wouldn’t quote on the 64GB iPhone 4S (it did have the 32GB and 16GB models); Regadget had no price for the original Galaxy Note either.

More importantly, this research reaffirms that the prices available on eBay for phones of this vintage in the same condition are much higher, and that doesn’t only apply to iPhones. If you have the energy to sell your old working mobile phone yourself, you’ll almost certainly get more money back that way, even after you factor in fees.


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