Ordering and Reselling the iPhone 6S

Introduction

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you already know that the new iPhone 6S is coming out in a couple of weeks.  Well, the pre-orders started Saturday at midnight (which meant you stayed up late Friday night.)  Never one to turn down a reselling deal, my group of opportunistic resellers had a furious chat session on getting these pre-orders.  Here’s a running diary of how this all went down!  Thanks to everyone who participated (you know who you are.)

Which one to buy – Size

We were trying to figure out which variant to buy to maximize the resell.  First, there was the decision between the 6S and the 6S Plus.  This was sorta tough because we assumed the smaller size has wider mass appeal.  However, the China market loves the bigger screens, and who is your potential buyer here – most likely someone who’s going to buy one of these and take it to China to give to his friends/family over there or resell it himself.  Also, if you remember back from the 6 launch, the Plus’s were backordered longer.  So this was an easy decision.

Which color?

This was a pretty easy decision for us as well.  Without knowing the actual color, it’s usually a safe bet to go with the newest color.  Clearly Apple understood that their growth is coming from China and what does China like?  Gold colored things and even better than that, rose colored things.  Easy decision!

Which memory variant?

This decision was tougher than  color.  Usually when you resell items, you want the cheapest variation.  What that means is that while the 64GB will cost you $100 more, you probably won’t get $100 more on the resell.  That’s usually the rule of thumb.  However, in this instance, and if you’re an iPhone user, you know that 16GB just isn’t enough!  So we decided to just go with the 64GB variant since a) it’s more useful and b) early adopters (people who pay more to get their hands on things first) will want the extra memory.

Which carrier?

This one was the toughest out of all of them.  Clearly we wanted an UNLOCKED version, but we weren’t sure which option would give us an UNLOCKED version.  We did some research online and tried to remember back to the 6.  We knew one thing – that we didn’t want to touch the Sprint version (sorry Sprint guys.)  We learned that the ATT version is a different version than the Verizon/Tmobile/Sprint version due to some ‘Band 30’ that ATT has that the other 3 didn’t have.  We were also worried that ATT still had contracts, so for non-ATT customers, it’d be hard for us to buy.  That left the Verizon and the T-Mobile version as the best reselling variants.

Where to purchase?

Clearly the best site to order this would be the Apple site, but we were worried it’d go down again like in previous pre-orders, and so Esther suggested we buy from the ‘Apple Store’ app instead of the web site since last year, she was still able to buy from the app although the web site was down (hand it to Apple to give their own customers preference.)  Of course, each carrier was taking pre-orders as well, so we had each one of their sites locked and loaded.  We also remembered Best Buy and Sam’s Club were taking pre-orders, so we had their site up too.

Verizon went live at around 11:55PM

While we were waiting for midnight, it looks like Verizon’s site went live 5 minutes early.  And if you look at the screenshot (HT: sfoflyer), WHICH COLOR IS ROSE GOLD!?!?  HAHA ARE YOU KIDDING ME VERIZON?  Couldn’t label the damn colors?  What if people fail the color test?  Anyway, if you weren’t a Verizon customer and although you wanted to pay full price, during the checkout process, it asks for your SSN.  That’s when you’ve been derailed off the tracks!  You DON’T want a soft or hard credit pull for a reselling item.  That’s when we abandoned ship on the Verizon site.

Midnight – Game time!

What I didn’t mention before was that the Apple site was down from something like 10PM to 11:30PM.

We were worried it wouldn’t come back up in time, but luckily it was up by around 11:50PM.  With 5 minutes to go, everyone’s adrenaline was pumping.  Quick aside – There’s this ‘resellers high’ that you get when you know you are getting a good deal.  It comes crashing down after you bought the item, but for the minutes beforehand, it’s an indescribeable feeling.  I got it with the Kaskade tickets, the BB-8 toy, and I’m sure many others.  Anyway, back to the story – there was a bit of delay on Apple’s site.  They didn’t go live until 12:05AM!  

When they went live, I was using Safari on my iPhone.  I ditched their web site (not sure why.)  While I don’t have a screenshot, I can tell you that on the mobile browser, the only unlocked option was T-Mobile.  So clearly the T-Mobile 6S+ 64GB Rose Gold was the one we wanted to buy.  If you wanted to buy the Verizon version and didn’t want to sign up for a plan, you had to do an in-store pickup reservation.  And that was that for the Apple site.

Next stop – T-Mobile JUMPONDEMAND

I think I told you guys I took advantage of the JUMPONDEMAND program where I’ll be basically saving $200 on whichever 6S I got.  I called them at 11:57PM and not 12:01AM.  The reason for that is simple – I figured I’d have to wait on the phone anyway, so by the time a CSR picked up, it’d be after midnight.  Luckily I only had to wait a minute before someone came on.  She proceeded to tell me about the program, which I kept going, “I know…I know…”  I wanted her to put this order in FAST, but clearly this wasn’t happening.  It took her about 10 minutes to enter in all of the order and when she went to submit, ERROR!  She then put me on hold for about another 10 minutes.  When she came back, she told me that the ordering system was working now, and so she was able to process the order.  It then took her another couple of minutes to put in the order for my wife’s JUMPONDEMAND and there was no problem with that one.  I just checked my call log – 34 minutes, 24 sec.   Someone else in the chat called after midnight and hung up after 30 minutes (I can’t say I blame him.)

Next stop – Citi ATT Access More card

This was one of the reasons I picked up the ATT More card last month.  To use the $650 phone credit, you have to shop through a special link on the Citi site (www.citi.com/att)  I was worried the phone wouldn’t be available, but surprisingly it was.  I however didn’t have ATT service.  Most people who don’t have ATT and want to do this deal usually have to sign up for ATT service, which will be a HP on your CR.  I didn’t want to go that route.  Luckily my buddy who has ATT was awake at the time, and I was able to log in to his account and “upgrade” one of his older phones.  I then checked out with my billing, shipping, and ATT card.  I’ll deal with unlocking the phone later, but honestly, I think I’ll just sell it as an ATT phone instead of an “UNLOCKED” ATT phone… we’ll see.

So how did we do on our choices?

Well, in the morning, we found a link to check the pre-order situation: http://iphone-inventory.blogspot.com/2015/09/iphone-6s-pre-order-tracker.html.  Here is the screenshot as of Saturday 10:00AM:

BOOM!  We clearly made the right decision on all 4 variables – T-Mobile, 6S Plus, 64GB, Rose.   It feels so good when you get it right.  Later, we found out that the T-Mobile one shipped from Apple comes UNLOCKED until you connect it to the Tmobile network.

No wonder the only UNLOCKED option when purchasing from Apple was “T-Mobile” and no wonder there is such a huge delay in them!  Now to figure out how to sell these things without being scammed or robbed on Craigslist or Ebay… Hopefully they won’t be as big a dud as the Star Wars BB-8 toys.