iPhone Sales on eBay Worldwide: The Glutting of the Gray Market

Yesterday I reported on eBay USA iPhone sales. Here's an update based on today's worldwide iphone listings on eBay with a comparison to other mobile device listings.

• iPhone LISTINGS (includes lots) = 2,453
• One seller is offering a lot of 800 units.
• 64 other sellers are offering lots (mostly 3-5 units).
• This excludes unlocking software totaling 293 listings.
• 16Gb iPhones are selling worldwide at an average price of $750
• Comparable mobile device listings
• Nokia E90 = 29 units
• Nokia N95 = 348 units
• Sony Ericsson (All phones @$400+) = 94

Observations:

• The $400-600 mobile phone market on eBay is glutted with iPhones.
• Lot sellers are trying to dump at least 1,000 units on eBay Worldwide
• Competitive mobile device listings in the same price range are minuscule compared to the thousands of iPhones currently on sale.
• Excess inventory is driving down iPhone sale prices on auctions and Buy It Now

As an eBay mobile device seller, I've never seen so many high-end cell phones for sale at the same time. Once the same mobile phone model reaches around 500 units on eBay, the price drops dramatically and sellers must re-list one or more times at lower prices to ditch the phones.

I believe, as I've mentioned before, Apple has a distribution problem.

Update on 2/18/08. I Googled "unlock iphone imei itunes sync 2008" and got over 11,000 hits. iPhone owners who want to unlock are clearly confused about iTunes synchronization, IMEI numbers and software and firmware updates. In addition, while eBay listed 706 unlocked iPhone listings (not including lots) on the day of my first blog post, eBay now has 2,129 unlocked listings and 2,909 total listings (including lots) on 2/18/08. SIM card listings have risen to 61 for the 1.1.2 firmware upgrade only.