EBay's Instant Sale Offers Cash for Old Electronics

Have a dead cell phone kicking around in your electronics drawer? No more excuses to keep it there. Auction giant eBay just made it easy to ditch such items in a sustainable manner with Instant Sale, a tool that allows users to almost instantly swap gadgets for money.

Here's how it works: type in the name, make, and model of a device, answer a few questions about its condition, and eBay makes a cash offer. If you decide to accept the offer, the site generates a shipping label and slips cash in your Paypal account once eBay receives the device for recycling.

Users can make a decent amount of cash with eBay's program. A Droid Eris in good condition, for example, fetches $87. And a first generation 16GB iPod Touch yields $38 (with the charger included). Even products with zero value can still be shipped to eBay for recycling--for free, of course.

This is far from the first online electronics recycling scheme. Best Buy also has a popular one, and a startup called Gazelle had the same idea a few years back. But eBay's propensity to attract people who are already trying to ditch old items -- often without success -- means the program could influence a significant portion of the site's 90 million users. And that's something to be excited about.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.