How to Sell Old Electronics for Cash

The order matters. Sign out of the accounts first, then wipe, then boot it once to confirm it lands on the setup screen. Wiping a device that is still tied to your account can leave the buyer holding a locked brick and you holding a refund request.

Everything below assumes you are selling to a person rather than posting it to a service. If you would rather hand the whole problem to a company with a prepaid label, the quote-and-inspection mechanics are worth reading first: how mail-in buyback quotes are set and revised.

Signing out and wiping before it leaves your hands

Back up first, and treat two things as separate from the photo backup: your authenticator app and your password manager. Moving an authenticator off a phone before wiping it is the step people skip, and it locks them out of their own accounts afterwards.

Then sign out, in the account settings, of every service tied to the hardware: the cloud account, the app store, the messaging service, the browser profile, the music library. On a laptop, remove the disk-encryption recovery link to your account and check whether you ever set a firmware or BIOS password.

Only then run the factory reset from inside the operating system. Boot it afterwards and confirm it reaches the language-select screen with no account prompt. If it asks for a password, it is not ready to sell.

Selling the handset you are still carrying is a sequencing problem of its own, since you need it working until the day it goes: selling the phone you are still using.

Proving it works inside the listing

Photograph the device powered on, showing the settings screen with the model name and the storage size. That single photo answers half the questions you would otherwise get in messages.

Photograph the screen twice more: once on a plain white background, which shows dead pixels and stains, and once on black, which shows backlight bleed. Cover or blur the serial number if you show the underside, because a serial in a public photo can be used to fake a support claim against your device.

Then write a tested-list. Ports, camera, speakers, microphone, keyboard, trackpad, wifi, bluetooth, headphone socket, card reader, disc drive. Say which of them you tested and which you did not. A short clip of it booting does more than any adjective.

Cables, chargers and boxes

The charger matters when it is proprietary or high-wattage, because the buyer cannot solve it with a generic cable from a corner shop. Include it, photograph it, and say whether it is the original.

The box matters to somebody collecting or reselling, and does nothing for somebody who is going to use the thing. Turning the loft over looking for the packaging is rarely repaid in anything but time. Do it if the box is on a shelf; skip it if it is a project.

A tangle of unlabeled cables in the same photo makes the listing look like a car boot. Photograph the device with the cables it needs and nothing else. The rest of the drawer is a separate lot or a recycling trip.

The cracked, dead or partly working path

List it as spares or repair, and describe the fault in the words a repairer would search: will not power on, no charging light, screen cracked but touch responds, boots then shuts down under load. Do not guess a diagnosis you cannot support, and never say it is an easy fix.

Photograph the damage from the angle that shows it worst. A buyer who sees the crack clearly and buys anyway does not open a dispute.

The audience changes here. Repairers and parts harvesters ask about board revisions and storage sizes rather than about condition, and they tend to want a fast local handover. If it has been wet, say so, because corrosion changes what the parts are usable for.

Account locks and activation locks

Activation lock, factory reset protection, carrier lock and workplace device management all survive a wipe. A device carrying any of them is a parts device, whatever it looks like when it is on.

Check by doing the wipe and the boot before you list. If the setup screen asks for a previous account, that account is the only thing that unlocks it. If it was a work laptop or phone, the employer's IT can release it from management and nobody else can. If you bought it second-hand and it is locked, the person who sold it to you is your only route.

Say the lock status in the listing plainly. Buyers ask, and the ones who claim they can remove it for you are a script rather than a service - which is a whole category: the scripts buyers run on sellers.

Battery honesty without tanking the sale

The device reports its own battery condition in settings on many platforms. Screenshot that screen and put it in the listing. A number the device produced is not an opinion you can be argued with about.

Where there is no such screen, describe your actual use: it runs a working morning of documents and needs the charger by lunch, or it will not hold a charge off the cable at all. That sentence sells better than silence, because a buyer who reads nothing about the battery assumes the worst and prices for it.

Say whether the battery has been replaced, and by whom. A swollen battery pushing the case or trackpad apart is a safety issue, not a cosmetic one - stop using the device, say so in the listing, and do not post it.

Devices where the effort outweighs the return

Old routers, printers, DVD players, chargers for phones nobody owns, tablets too old for a current operating system, laptops with a mechanical drive and a dead battery, and anything whose login you cannot recover.

The work is identical for a device nobody wants. Wipe, photograph, write, answer messages, arrange a meeting, wait. Municipal e-waste points and retailer take-back schemes clear those in one trip.

One caveat before anything goes in a recycling bin: if the device holds your data and will not boot, take the drive out where you can and keep it, or use a service that certifies the wipe. Do not hand a working drive to a stranger who offered to dispose of it for you.

Two links for the parts of the sale this post does not cover: setting an asking price for used tech, and meeting a buyer to hand over a device.

Wipe it, boot it, photograph the settings screen. In that order.