Thanks to our friends at ecoATM, we were able to gather some really interesting statistics about people’s trade-in/recycling behaviors after the iPhone 6’s launch. ecoATM is a company that owns and operates 1,100 machines across the United States that allow people to trade in their electronics and have them recycles for an instantaneous cash payout. ecoATM has been in this business for quite some time so they have experience with new product launches and sudden jumps in trade-ins.
As such, it comes as no surprise that they have some really interesting data about the iPhone 6 launch’s impact on iPhone trade-ins nationwide. Thanks to their data, we can see exactly what people are upgrading from as well as what kinds of devices are being replaced the most by iPhone 6s and 6 pluses.
So, what do these colored dots translate to? What do the blue (light), green (medium), light green (high) and orange (enormous) demand dots come down to?
EcoATM Trade-in Map
Since the iPhone 6 and 6 plus became available, ecoATM saw an increase of 80% on iPhone-related activity across their entire network of kiosks. And specifically in California, trade-ins were up 104% and in Texas 92%. EcoATM says that they normally expect such jumps in these areas because these regions are populated with plenty of techies. They did, however, discover some outliers including Tennessee, which saw an increase of 195% and Massachusetts with an increase of 168%. When looking at the map, it does seem a bit odd that the Tennessee/Kentucky/Ohio area is so dense with trade-in activity but the stats don’t lie. They also saw New York increase 92%, like Texas, which isn’t surprising considering how many iPhone users live in New York City alone.
In addition to actual iPhone trade-in’s ecoATM’s own site saw a huge amount of increase interest in their phone recycling for cash kiosks. Their website has seen a 200% increase in sessions since the launch as well as their kiosk locator page saw an increase of 250% during the same period since the launch.
People were also checking the prices of specific devices before they went to the ecoATM Kiosks (which you can do here)
The iPhone 5S saw an increase of 205% of inquiries, the iPhone 5C saw an increase of 110% and the iPhone 5 saw an increase of a whopping 480%. Clearly, you can tell that the majority of people looking to upgrade to the iPhone 6 are people with iPhone 5’s which makes sense since that would have been 2 years ago when people first signed their new 2-year contracts. Additionally, the iPhone 4S saw an increase of 100% in inquiries and the iPhone 4 saw a pretty sizable 240% increase as well.
But Apple’s iPhones weren’t the only devices that started to get more trade-in interest, there was plenty of interest in trading-in Samsung devices as well. The fairly new Samsung Galaxy S5 actually saw an increase of 77% in inquiries while the Galaxy S4 saw the biggest increase among Samsung devices with a 110% increase. The Galaxy S3 saw an increase of 63% and all Galaxy Notes (Note, Note 2, and Note 3) saw an increase of 93% in inquiries.
Overall, if you take all of this trade-in data into consideration it really seems like the iPhone 5 was the primary device that people were looking to replace with an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, which admittedly isn’t very surprising. What may actually be more interesting is the regional increases, especially in Tennessee. Either way, there is a lot of very good data about the needs and wants of iPhone users and it really looks like a lot of people buying the iPhone 6 were already iPhone users and many of them were very likely iPhone 5 users too.
