Introduction - I've just started using the tool, what should I keep in mind?

The tool is not an instant money printer; While It will automate and eliminate 95% of the efforts associated with finding good deals on eBay, the remaining 5% is completely up to you.

To make the most out of the tool, we recommend to fully read this list, and then spend at least 30 minutes to get familiar with the tool's interface and its different features.

By doing so, along with following our other tips and best practices, you will become efficient and resourceful enough to start sourcing many devices on a constant basis.

What are the main features of the tool?

The tool catalogs every device into custom categories that are not available on the general eBay site, such as specific condition (e.g, Cracked, Bad IMEI, IC Locked, Used with defects, etc.) and cosmetic condition, which can range from poor to brand new.

The first main feature is real-time email alerts that can be sent instantly to your inbox, whenever a new deal gets listed, based on your specific preferences (such as model, condition, cosmetic state, carrier, deal type, trust score, and more). Often, these alerts will require your immediate attention, and thus it is extremely important to customize them in a way that is optimal for your needs.

This customization can be made on the "Dashboard" tab on the website and should take only several minutes. In general, any real-time deal that was ever tracked by the tool (and could potentially reach your email) will appear under the "Recent Deals" tab on the website.

When an email alert is sent, it will contain a link to the relevant listing, often together with more useful information, like the price that other eBay shoppers have recently paid for a similar item, which can help you make a quick appraisal. To make a more thorough appraisal, you can use the "view similar" search icon, to see a comprehensive result list of similar listings, which you can further filter (e.g, whether already sold or not).

The second main feature, under the "Browse all Phones" tab on the website, is a full search interface with advanced segmentation options. On this interface, virtually any iPhone listing on eBay will be cataloged, regardless of whether our algorithm detected this listing as a deal or not, and whether they were just recently listed or not. Using this interface will allow you to unveil many more potential devices for purchase.

All features are fully available both on mobile and desktop/tablet.

What type of email alerts can I choose to receive?

By default, users are opted in to Instant email alerts. To help you understand what the recommended action to take is with regard to any given deal alert, instant alerts will have one of the two following email titles:

1) Your Deal Alert (BIN):
The algorithm recommends to buy the item right away (BIN: Buy it Now)

2) Your Deal Alert (Submit your Best Offer):
The algorithm recommends to submit your best offer to win the item.

BIN deals may often sell out within minutes, and therefore it is more important to give them immediate attention. However, some "best offer" deals may sell out pretty quick as well, once the seller receives the first offer he's happy enough with.

About 85% of the alerts sent will be best offer alerts. That is because these are often listings that start as an auction and don't have a BIN price at all (in which case, instead of a price, you will see a "Starting Bid" value). This is understandable since most inexperienced sellers wouldn't know how to price their item.

However, about 27% of such auctions that are found with the tool, never become active auctions, and end up selling for a best price offer, often within two hours. This is because both the seller and the buyer will prefer to make the transaction right away, rather than wait on an auction process with an unknown outcome.

As a buyer, you also don't want to publicly reveal your interest in the item to other prospective buyers, by placing a public bid, as this may often lead to a counter bid to be placed. On the contrary, when you submit an offer, it can be seen only by the seller.

Therefore, whenever you get an alert for an auction listing, your goal should be to quickly submit an offer (and not place a bid). Submitting your best offer in this case, can be done only before anyone has already placed a bid.

Instant alerts will often pertain to a single listing, and you should be able to see the important details (such as price, model, condition, etc.) already in the preview of the email, on your phone screen.

Other types of alerts:

Hourly: sent on an hourly basis, and will include both BIN deals and best offer deals within the same email, that were posted within the past hour.

Daily: sent once a day, and will include only BIN deals that were posted within the past 24 hours, in order to limit the size of the email message.

These type of alerts are less useful if you intend to actually buy items, as most good deals will already get sold out by the time you receive these emails, especially in the case of daily alerts.

What do the different colors of the deal labels, in the recent deals tab represent?

Red/Yellow:
Recommendation: Buy the item right away, the seller does not accept offers.

Blue/Light Blue:
Recommendation: Buy the item right away, though the seller also accepts offers.

Pink:
Recommendation: submit your best offer to win the item.
These listing will be either auctions with no "buy it now" price at all, or have a "buy it now" price that the tool does not identify as low enough to be a deal, yet the seller is accepting offers and the tool evaluates that the seller is likely to accept an offer.

Tweaking my preferences on the alert dashboard seems complicated

Tweaking your alert preferences shouldn't take long at all, as there's no need to do it for each model one by one. The correct way to tweak the preferences is to use the "Edit Multiple" option in the dashboard, click on the pencil icon on the relevant column you want to edit (e.g, Network), choose your settings and click on "Apply". The chosen settings will be applied to all the models whose checkbox was marked during editing. If needed, you can then proceed to individually edit settings for particular models (or to completely turn off the alerts for them). The whole process should take just a few minutes, and then you're good to go.

Multiple Edit:

Single Edit:

How can I make sure my email settings will work as expected?

For any deal found with the tool, an email icon will be displayed next to it, to indicate if the email alert was delivered, or supposed to be delivered to you, based on your current settings. Use this feature to verify that you're indeed receiving email alerts about the devices you care about, and to make sure you're not missing out on deals due to subscription settings that are not adjusted correctly. This feature is available both on the "Recent Deals" tab and on the "Browse all Phones" tab.

I'm getting relevant email alerts, but I don't check them on time

There's no need to open each and every email, since the email preview text should often provide enough information for you to decide whether to open the email message or not. If you don't see the email preview on your phone's home screen at all, simply because you have disabled that option (as you get too many emails from other senders), we suggest to open a new designated email address, and turn on email push notifcations only for that address. You can do so for example with the Gmail app. If you wish to change your associated email address, please contact us.

I'm getting way too many email alerts than I can handle

Make sure that you have customized your alert preferences under the Dashboard tab, in a way that is optimal for your needs, by taking the following steps:

Step 1:
If you're not interested at all in certain phone model, you can completely disable it.

Step 2:
If you're not interested at all in a phone that belongs to a particular condition, carrier, cosmetic state, or a storage size, you can uncheck that criteria and apply the setting to some or all of the phone models for which alerts are enabled.

Example A:
If you never want to get alerts on Sprint phones, you can choose to get alerts only for Unlocked phones, or phones that are locked to specific networks, and check these networks, but uncheck "Sprint".

Example B:
If you are not interested in purchasing cracked phones, or brand new phones at all, or are finding that not enough deals on these type of phones work for you, you can uncheck this condition too under the "condition" column.

Example C:
If you're only after phones which are explicitly Bad IMEI or Financed, and locked to Verizon, you can set only those two conditions under the Carrier and the Condition columns.

Step 3:
Under deal type, you may subscribe to "Buy it now only" deals for some or all phone models. However, this means you will miss out on a great segment of deals that are often overlooked by other eBay buyers, as only about 15% of the deals we find fall into the BIN category.

In general, you can try adjusting your settings only for the type of devices in which you are most commonly interested and focus on them first. Once you get the hang of using the tool and make successful purchases, you can gradually expand your preferences to catch more types of devices.

I'm not sure if a given price is a good deal or not

The most fundamental thing when using the tool to purchase a device, is to clearly know beforehand what price you are willing to pay for any given device, with any given criteria. Obviously, this depends on the maximum price for which you can later re-sell the device for (and any other related expenses).

The only way that the tool can help you in this aspect, is with the aforementioned features that can quickly show you for what price similar devices were recently sold (by using the "Browse all Deals" tab and filtering results to sold items, or using the "view similar" link that is shown next to any phone listing).

If you're not reselling phones on a constant basis, so that such pricing information is not instantly at your disposal, you can use the tool (or any other resources) to make your own research in advance, so the next time a new deal gets posted, you'll be able to quickly make a decision before the item sells out.

I'm getting alerts on good deals, but they sell out too fast

First, make sure you have followed all of the above best practices: You have subscribed to instant deal alerts, and are able to preview the alerts as soon as they land in your email. Also make sure that you have mastered the price range that you're willing to pay for any given device, so you can make the decision as fast as possible.

Another technical idea is to keep our recent deals page always open in your browser, and refresh this page once you get a relevant alert (as the new deal will show there), instead of opening the page from the email message.

Second, the deals that sell out fast are usually the BIN deals. There are plenty more listings you can win by submitting your best offer as well, which tend to take longer time to end. While speed is of essence with these listings as well, the more important thing in those cases is to try to submit an offer that the seller is likely to accept.

Third, make sure you are actually clicking the links in your email alert. This will also auto log you in to the tool. Our emails are being sent using a queue, and the first group of users to receive them will be those who have been recently active in recent time.

Fourth, you should always occasionally browse the full search interface as well, as you may find there many potential devices to purchase that were not picked by the tool as deals in real time.

What are some other good ways to find deals, not necessarily with real time alerts?

You don't always have to be very quick to land good deals. Sometimes, you simply have to be resourceful or creative enough.

Example A:
If you do repairs (or outsource them), there are various categories for devices with specific defects (cracked, used with defects – like no face id, green line), that you may find as good candidates for purchase.

Example B:
If you filter for only items that have their IMEI shown in the listing, and categorized as Financed or Bad IMEI, you can try checking the IMEI and may find out that the phone is in fact clean / paid off, and so it is underpriced by the seller.

Example C:
You can filter the results to a specific model and condition, like all Used iPhone X, and sort the results by recent date. Check which listing have not sold yet for quite some time (or listings that now have a lower prices than before, which mean the seller is trying to discount the item in order to finally sell it), and try to get it for a lower price, whether by simply submitting an offer (if the listing accepts them – you can use the designated filter for that), or by simply contacting the seller and ask for a discount.

Tip: Hover on the (?) icon if it shows, to instantly see more info about the listing (for example, if the crack is in the back or in the front).

I'm seeing good prices overall, but they aren't low enough as I would have liked, or won't allow me the biggest margins I had thought of

When you're about to source phones on eBay, you first need to have the right mindset, and realize that sourcing from eBay is not about making the biggest margin possible on each purchase, but rather about continuous volume and comfort, without being dependent on a single supplier or your geographic location.

For obvious reasons, you may not pull off the same margins that you may have pulled had you found and picked up the same phone locally, for example.

However, when you consider your margins, you must also consider the hidden cost that is associated with any alternative sourcing method, which is the cost of doing business. Spending time posting ads, responding to inquiries, chatting with random strangers, scheduling meetings, driving around, gas expenses, and any other associated costs that consume your resources, make it incorrect to simply compare the plain margins that are allegedly derived from the price you pay for the device.

I would have bought the item if only it was priced about 10-20% less.

Many of the listings that the tool detects as deals often accept offers. Submitting an offer for 10% less is very reasonable, and may work for you if you really can't afford to buy the item for the listed price, assuming that other buyers still haven't bought the item yet.

Furthermore, If the item is not in 100% functional state (e.g, Cracked, Bad ESN, and especially if IC locked), there's is a good chance that the seller will agree to even lower offers (for IC locked devices, sometime even up to 40% less). Remember that especially if the seller is inexperienced, the fact that he chose to list an item for a certain amount, doesn't necessarily mean that this is the only price range he will agree too.

Finally, even if the seller does not officially accept offers, if you really want the item and think there's a chance the seller will go for it, you can simply contact him by sending a message. Sometimes on the Recent Deals tab, you would see a message that says "sold within X minutes (seller dropped the price by $Z)". This usually means that the listing was not accepting offers, and the seller was convinced to lower the price by the buyer who bought the item.

I've tried submitting an offer, but it was declined

You can submit up to 5 offers for each listing. If you're ready to pay somewhat more to win an item, try submitting another offer right after your previous offer was declined.

When submitting an offer, think first about what would be the highest price you'd still be willing to pay for the item, rather than about the price that will grant you the highest margin.

In probability theory, this is called "expected value": Eventually, it is always better to have an 80% chance to make a $40 margin, than a 5% chance to make a $100 margin.

Whenever two or more prospective buyers submit competing offers, the buyer that adapts this rational approach will always be the one that is more likely to win the item.

I'm not seeing any good deals at all

First, make sure that you have thoroughly read this guide and followed our recommended best practices for using the tool.

Then, instead of waiting for new deals, open the "Recent Deals" tab, and filter the results to all BIN deals that were posted, and go over the results from the past few days. You may also apply additional filters such as model, for easier comparison.

You will notice that many of the devices displayed, were sold out sometimes within just few minutes. Most of the time, this means that another re-seller has bought the item, which means he found the price to be profitable enough (unless an offer was accepted).

As opposed to such other resellers, if you're unable to see how you can make any decent margin from any type of deal that was already sold, you would have to ask yourself why it is so. Is your reselling funnel crafted and optimized in a way that allows you to maximize your return for any given device which you can potentially buy and resell?

For example, the most saturated and competitive sub-market is unlocked, fully functional devices. If your only funnel for such devices is to resell them to a private domestic buyer, your buying prices would never be as competitive as a reseller who sells such devices to the public, whether it is local public (no selling fees involved at all), or using an online platform (e.g, Swappa, where the fees are quite low).

Another example is devices that require a repair: If you just resell the defective items as-is, most chances are that your buying prices are less competitive. If you fix them first, you should have a competitive advantage if you can fix them by yourself. If you're outsourcing the repair to a third party, make sure that you're getting the most competitive rates for the work.

If you're buying and reselling Bad IMEI devices, or IC locked devices, check with your direct buyer what is really the maximum price they will agree to pay, rather than what's listed on their buying sheet. For better rates, see how you can connect with overseas buyers, rather than domestic buyers.

All of these advices are true regardless of whether you're using the tool or not. The better you optimize and tailor your reselling funnels for any given device, the more profit you could make, which in return will affect your ability to source a larger amount of devices.

Eventually, if you conclude that you're able to profit only with devices which fall into a very particular criteria, change your alert settings into that criteria only.

A few of the "Buy It Now" alerts I get are not good deals at all

The tool accuracy is about 90%, and we constantly strive to make it better. With some types of devices, such as damaged devices, our algorithm is less restrictive since it is harder to evaluate the actual damage and how much should it affect the price. However, in those cases, the chances that the seller will accept a much lower offer, also increase as well.

If you notice that for particular model you get "BIN" alerts even though the price is not good enough, please contact us so we can look into that. If it happens too often for a particular model, and you rather not get alerts about it at all (and possibly miss out on other deals that match the same criteria), you may simply opt out from the relevant combination of model/condition (e.g, if this happens for cracked iPhone 6, edit the iPhone 6 section and uncheck "cracked" from the condition column).

I'm seeing many devices when I look for sold items under the "Browse all phones" tab, that I would have bought myself, but a deal alert was never sent for them

Even if you have configured your alert preferences in the way that suits all your interests, our algorithm simply can't detect every possible deal with 100% accuracy.

For this reason, we strongly suggest to use the "Browse all phones" tab occasionally, and go through the all the items, by filtering them first to a specific model, and then apply additional filters (such as include or exclude certain conditions and cosmetic conditions) to make it easier for you to compare among the results. You can then sort the results by lowest price and start checking for good deal opportunities.

If you notice that this constantly happens with some particular devices, let us know and we may be able to update our algorithms to match it.

I’m seeing good deals but I’m hesitant to purchase some of them since I can't verify the status of the device in advance

Sellers are not obligated to provide the IMEI number in advance. On Swappa, they are even forbidden from doing so. If you are concerned about the IMEI number, you may request to check it right after you purchase the item. If you find out that the seller did not describe the device status correctly, you are protected by eBay and can always cancel your purchase right after.

How do I know if I can trust the seller?

One of the best advantages of buying on eBay is their pro-buyer approach. If anything goes wrong with your purchase, whether if the item was not shipped, or if you found out that the state of the item is different than what was explicitly listed in the listing's description, you can request the seller or eBay itself to cancel the purchase.

However, to prevent this situation in advance, we rate every deal we send with a seller "Trust Score" from 1 to 5. Anytime the trust score is 2 or above, it is usually safe to assume that the listing is legit.

If the trust score is only 1/5, by default we will not send an alert about it (unless you change the setting in your dashboard), and in this case, we suggest to inquire the seller for more details before making a purchase.

Sometimes, the trust score will show as "?", which means that our algorithm simply couldn't evaluate the seller. In this case, the alert will be sent anyway so you don't miss out on the possible deal.

If you wish to receive less alerts, and only from more established sellers, you can change the minimum trust score to a higher value like 3/5. However, you should keep in mind that established sellers are less likely to underprice their items.

The actual price on eBay doesn't match the email alert I received

Sometimes, even though rarely, the seller may raise the price right after posting the listing, and so the email alert you received will still refer to the original listed price.

I'm not getting any alerts at all

If your settings on the dashboard tab are set up correctly, and you're still not getting any emails, please check your spam folder. If you see that emails are reaching your spam instead of your inbox, click on "report not spam" (or any similar button if you're not using Gmail), and also add our sender address to your email contact list.

If you're using any kind of email forwarding, check also the spam box of the forwarder email. In general, we recommned not to use any forwarding setup, as this can also delay the time it takes our email alert to reach your actual inbox.

Alerts sometimes hit my spam box

We recommend using Gmail. If you want to change your email address, please contact us with your request. If you're on Gmail and the alerts sometimes go to your spam box, besides adding our sender address to your contact list, and marking emails as "not spam", you can create a custom filter to tell Gmail (or your other provider) to never send our messages into your spam, as in the following screenshot:

Is there a way to hide items I've already seen?

You can hide items you've already seen, from showing up again in your search results within the "Browse all Phones" tab, by clicking the "hide" icon. This is useful whenever you occasionally search for phones with certain attributes, for example, iPhone XR that is Bad IMEI or Financed - and then go over all the results sorted by lowest price. If you figure that you're not interested in some of the matching items, you can now permanently hide them from showing again in your results, to make it easier for you the next time you search for similar phones.