Is it worth buying faulty tablets off eBay to repair & resell for profit?

I bought two lots of faulty laptops and tablets from eBay with the intention of repairing and reselling them as mentioned in my previous blog posts. Without repeating myself this was largely a success more so with the laptops and not so much with the tablets. The problem with the tablets not being profitable is because they are old and go out of date more quickly than laptops and the newer ones are more difficult to repair as they are usually glued together and cannot be taken apart easily. So, with this in mind I bought older models and avoided ones with obvious cracked screens. The majority of the faults were broken USB sockets which were replaceable but given the cost of the parts and eBay fees I only just broke even.

The other thing I found was some of these tablets had obviously come from computer repair shops and had missing parts and / or multiple faults as they had been used to make a good tablet out of several faulty ones and almost all parts in the ones I bought were faulty. Some were made to look like they had never been opened. Take this one for example; a Samsung  nexus 10 tablet which had a broken power / USB socket and a broken power button. I replaced the USB connector and power button but it still would not power up although the battery was charging. I removed the metal shield covering the CPU and flash chips and found that the flash chip had holes drilled into it. Now the seller had made a really good job of reassembling this tablet and making it look like it had never been opened. I was clearly ripped off here. Some of the others were in a similar state.

I thought I’d mention this for anyone who is thinking of buying faulty tablets to try and repair them. Watch out as most are junk unless you are buying from genuine private sellers selling three of them at most. Also they are often account locked and even if you fix them they are useless without being de-registered by the previous owner. This is why I avoid apple products but the latest Android devices are doing the same thing too.

So, take my advice. Don’t bother buying bulk faulty tablets and phones unless you like wasting your money.