Prices & value
What actually lowers your phone's trade-in price
Not all damage costs the same. Ranked by rupees, the list is not the one most people expect.
The ranking, most expensive first
| What's wrong | Typical cost | Fixable before selling? |
|---|---|---|
| Phone will not power on or take calls | Most of the value | No |
| Touchscreen unresponsive | Most of the value | Rarely economic |
| Display replaced outside authorised service | 25–80% | No — already done |
| Cracked or shattered glass | 15–30% | Usually not worth it |
| Dead pixels, lines or burn-in | 10–25% | No |
| Multiple functional faults | Up to 50% combined cap | Sometimes |
| Battery below 80% | Small, inside the fault cap | Not economic |
| Dents and heavy body scratches | 5–15% | No |
| No box, no charger, no bill | 3–5% | Only by finding them |
Why a replaced screen costs more than a broken one
This is the counter-intuitive one. A cracked original display is a repair the buyer will do with a genuine part, and it is priced as such. A phone that already carries a third-party panel is a different proposition: colour accuracy, touch calibration and water resistance are all uncertain, and on iPhones the phone itself reports the part as non-genuine.
So the deduction for "display not original" is typically larger than the deduction for "glass cracked". If your screen is broken, get quotes both ways before you spend anything — the arithmetic is in is a screen replacement worth it.
Cliffs versus slopes
Condition ladders are slopes: one scratch, several scratches, a crack. Each step costs a bit more. The screening questions are cliffs: the phone either makes calls or it does not, the touchscreen either works or it does not.
Understanding which is which tells you where to spend effort. Cleaning a phone moves you along a slope by a few hundred rupees. Getting a dead charging port fixed can move you back from a cliff, and occasionally that does pay.
What is cheap to fix and worth doing
- Find the box and bill. Free, and worth a few per cent.
- Charge the phone. A phone that will not switch on at inspection gets graded as one that will not switch on.
- Clean it properly. Grime reads as neglect and invites a closer look at everything else.
- Replace a missing SIM tray. A few hundred rupees, and its absence looks like tampering.
- Clear the storage and sign out. Not a price factor, but a failed sale is a 100% deduction.
What does not lower the price, whatever you have heard
Half the anxiety in a used phone sale is spent on things that carry no deduction at all.
- A screen protector, fitted or removed. Only the glass underneath is graded.
- The phone's colour. Structured price books key off model, variant, condition and age.
- Which network you used. Irrelevant unless the handset is carrier-locked.
- High screen-on time or a large number of charge cycles. Only the resulting battery health figure is graded.
- A repair you had done under warranty at an authorised centre. Genuine parts, no deduction.
- Having used the phone heavily. Wear shows up in the condition ladders; usage itself is not a category.
Knowing this is worth money in a private sale, where buyers routinely try to price these as faults. In a structured quote they simply are not questions.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a scratched back reduce phone value much?
- Not much. Body scratches sit on the cheapest ladder in the book, typically a single-digit percentage, and they are capped alongside dents within the body section.
- Is it worth cleaning my phone before selling?
- Yes, for a few minutes' work. It does not change the grade directly, but a clean handset is inspected more quickly and generously than a grimy one.
- Do I lose money without the charger?
- A little. Charger, box and bill together typically account for 3–5% of the ceiling, given back item by item.
- What is the single most expensive thing that can be wrong?
- Anything that stops the phone being usable — no power, no calls, or a dead touchscreen. Those are priced as parts value rather than as a working handset.
- Does a phone's colour affect its trade-in price?
- No. Structured price books value model, storage variant, condition and age. Colour can matter slightly in a private sale where a buyer wants a specific finish, but not in a quote.