Sunsetting the Boneyard

Sunsetting the Boneyard



We are sunsetting the Swappa Boneyard. We will stop allowing new listings during the first week of August, then will give time for existing listings to sell or expire.

 

If you don’t know what the Boneyard is, that’s okay, it’s probably because we’ve never really advertised or promoted the section of the site. If you are aware of the Boneyard and have bought or sold there, then you probably understand why we are discontinuing the offering.

 

When we launched the Boneyard in 2014, we wanted to offer a place for users to buy and sell items that couldn’t be listed on our primary marketplace. Being that Swappa (especially at that time) specializes in phones and has a strict “no junk” policy, the Boneyard quickly became a hub for broken and damaged mobile devices that didn’t fit our “fully functional, ready for activation” requirements.

 

This included phones with water-damaged and cracked screens, old mobile hardware like flip phones and mobile accessories, but also blacklisted and financed devices. The Boneyard was meant to be a place for legitimate sellers to list devices that didn’t meet our stringent marketplace criteria. However, without Swappa’s usual moderation efforts green lighting sellers and the goods they were listing, some sellers were taking advantage of the unmoderated service to sell things that shouldn’t be bought.

 

At Swappa we pride ourselves as being a safer marketplace than eBay and Craigslist, and without strict moderation, the Boneyard turned into the Wild West. While most users of the service understood the rules, there are abusers, and we have decided that maintaining our Boneyard doesn’t align with our goal to connect users with functional, ready-to-use tech.

 

Since first launching the Boneyard the main Swappa marketplace has expanded to a far broader catalog with categories like laptops, tablets, home tech and video games. And our moderation and support services have continued to improve from already the best to even better. While the Boneyard won’t be a part of ongoing offerings, we invite you to continue buying and selling with confidence on Swappa.