I don’t know where the saying comes from but it’s pretty morbid – “There are many ways to skin a cat.”

Well, there are many ways as well to recycle your cell phone.

You can give it to us or any one of hundreds of services online.  Like those other services, we do the work to determine if the phone can be reused again. You can also take up a larger collection of cell phones and we will offer payment based on the resale value of the phone and the amount of time & expense it takes us to make the phone functional.

On the other hand, you might have a cell phone that is working perfectly and is worth more than a few bucks – namely newer model iPhones and Blackberry smartphones. Giving something away that is worth $200 or more can be a hard pill to swallow which is why the phones we typically recover are usually over 3 years old.

There are options out there that can help you recover value for your old phone.

The first option is to sell your sell phone to a “cash for cell” type service.  A quick review of the service options out there reveals that you’ll get between 10% and 80% of the phone’s value.  Not bad but there are so many weasel words in the fine print of these services that allow them to reduce the payout to nothing if your phone is scuffed or scratched.

The second option is to list your phone on eBay.  Believe it or not between March 23 and April 5, 2010 there were more than 81,000 listings of used cell phones on eBay according to terapeak.com.  Only 33% of those listings resulted in a sale – but eBay charged its listing fees for each post whether successful or not.  Since the auction giant charges a sliding scale for what they term as insertion fees based on the initial ask price of your item, this is a significant expense for each person who is not successful in selling their item.

Newspaper classifieds, Kijiji, and Craigslist are also options when it comes time to sell your phone.  The problem here, however, is that we all have a natural tendency to offer less than the ask price when it comes to buying through classifieds.  There is also a potential safety risk here as you are required to either reveal your location or meet the buyer in person -  and there are many scary stories you can find online.  Lets not forget also that newspapers need to cover their costs of printing so a classified ad is not necessarily going to be free, in fact in my city of Barrie the least expensive classified ad costs about $30 for 1 day!

Given these challenges it’s no wonder that so few of the estimated 30,000 cell phones that are deactivated daily in Canada ever find their way out of drawers.

So I decided to do something about that.

Since my family & I simply don’t have the cash to offer payment to each person who has a high value phone for recycling we launched a new web service where you can offer your cell phone for sale on either auction or for a fixed price.  The best part about it is that there are no listing fees for a basic listing which includes up to 2 photos and a video if you’re so inclined.  The only fees charged are for add-ons to your listing such as making it featured on the homepage and a flat 10% commission on successful sales.  The bottom line is if it doesn’t sell, you don’t pay.

The service is called CellKitty.com where you can get the purrfect deal for your cell phone

Please check it out & leave your thoughts.  We will continue to offer both CellCycle.ca and CellKitty.com services and hope to serve you well.