Apple Seeds: iPhone price-drop equals surge in eBay sales
If you’re a long-time Terapeak subscriber and/or blog reader, you’ll know we’ve had a keen interest in iPhones since the first 3G models were released last summer. It wasn’t hard to predict then that the device would become an instant eBay superstar, and so the Terapeak iPhone index became the very first in our collection of Terapeak indexes.
Fast forward to a week ago yesterday, when Apple dropped the price of its entry-level iPhone to $99 USD, and many began wondering how in-store price cuts would affect eBay sales. Well, as you can see below, the immediate reaction has been anything but slow:
The above image, of course, was captured using the Terapeak iPhone index, which we’ll surely be following in the coming weeks, and shows an incredible spike in both 3G and Locked iPhone total sales. You can also track iPhone (and Blackberry) sales using the index’s companion widget, as seen below:
And one last point of interest, as mentioned in the previously-linked-to Metro article: Apple has also unveiled its 3GS iPhone — a supposedly faster, more expensive model that records video — and will begin selling those later this month.
Suffice to say, Apple and the iPhone folks aren’t dropping off the eBay radar anytime soon!
What our clients say?
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Yeah, except how about some relevance? The vast majority of ebay sellers (your customers) are never going to be able to get wholesale pricing or supply on iPhones, so what is the point of presenting the data???
Hi “teraspeak”, thanks for your input!
A couple reactions to your comments:
1. You’d be quite surprised by how many of our subscribers do in fact sell iPhones and related accessories! It’s obviously not the easiest market to break into, but Terapeak has a very wide range of sellers amongst its subscriber base.
2. iPhones (and iPods) are indeed an example we use more often than others when discussing trends and sales patterns, as we feel it’s a visible market whose values can be seen and understood better than more obscure items and categories. With blog posts like this one, we’re not necessarily encouraging all of our readers to go out and source iPhones — as, like you said, that would be quite unrealistic — but rather to observe the effects of product launches and price modifications, and to better foresee similar patterns within their own specialized markets.
Hope that helps you understand things a bit better!
Hal