Verizon Offers Credit for Trade Ins

Verizon has a new trade-in program, providing customers an easy way to dispose of their old mobile phones. The mobile carrier has an online tool that will calculate the trade in value of your old mobile phone. Unfortunately, there’s a big cost for convenience since Verizon isn’t offering customers fair values for their phones.

Customers who don’t like dealing with strangers on Craigslist or eBay may appreciate Verizon’s new service as it is more convenient, but there are other services that are just as easy to use and send out checks, PayPal payments or gift cards.

A quick check of Verizon’s trade in page shows that the carrier is only offering $36 in credits for the 8GB Apple iPhone 3GS. Gazelle.com, a reliable electronics trade-in service, will pay  $105 for the same device. If Verizon will only pay $36 for last year’s iPhone, what do you think it’ll pay for lesser phones? In some cases $0. That’s right, Verizon won’t give you a dime for many of the phones listed on its trade-in site.

Instead of offering cash for supposedly worthless devices, it provedes a link to donate them to its HopeLine program, which sounds like a worthy cause.

Prices offered for some current smartphones are close to their subsidized prices, but they’re still lower than what Gazelle offers and you’d still have to take an ETF hit.

via PocketNow