Best Place to Sell Backup Hearing Aids

eBay is the best place, I think, yes.

I recommend listing hearing aids as “Buy It Now” rather than an auction. Auctions work best when there are dozens of people who might want what you’re selling or when you just need to get out fast at whatever price. When there are only a few people who might be interested in an item like hearing aids and you don’t mind if it takes a month or two, the final selling price tends to be better with “Buy It Now” than at auction.

To set a Buy It Now price, you need to know what these aids have actually sold for recently (NOT what other sellers are asking which is a very poor indicator of the aids’ value, although you probably won’t sell if your asking price is significantly higher than others’). You are more likely to actually sell them of course if you price them on the low end. Don’t expect much money for them. Private sellers typically get about 10-20% of the original price of three-year old aids in excellent condition. Sometimes a seller gets lucky and gets more, but most people expecting 33-50% of the new cost of the aids, unless the model is in exceptional demand, don’t actually sell them.

To see what your aids have actually sold for, search for them on eBay and after a line of listings pops up, in the left column (on a computer at least), scroll down and check the Sold button and then reload. This will show you listings that actually sold in recent months and unless a seller accepted a Best Offer, the listing will show in green what the sales price was. Target yourself in the middle of a range of actual sales prices in green that you see. Keep in mind that some people’s aids may be a higher-level model or be in worse condition than yours, either of which affects the value somewhat. Aids with included accessories that people want will sell for more. Of course disregard the sales prices of aids marked Not Working or For Parts Only.

Oh, you can also what listings expired unsold by unchecking the Sold Items box on the left but leaving Completed Items checked. Now any price you see that’s not in green didn’t sell; people were asking too much or their aids had another issue like needing service that was disclosed in the original listing, which you can see by clicking the tiny print near the top that says “Original Listing.” Try to figure out why some aids sell and some don’t. This is the best way to set your Buy It Now price.

One thing all good eBay sellers of hearing aids do (you’ll see the language in their listings) is warn purchasers they must take the aids to an audiologist and pay to have them programmed.

Keep in mind that it is possible to get burned on eBay. Some of the things that can go wrong is the buyer can claim he never got the item, or he claims they arrived broken, or he substitutes a broken pair of aids for your good ones. These things don’t happen often, but in any one sale, they can happen. eBay will typically believe a lying buyer and refund him by yanking the money out of seller’s bank account, and there’s nothing you can do about it if that’s eBay’s decision. For this reason, I wouldn’t sell something really valuable I couldn’t afford to lose.

What about donating HA’s? Is there an agency that will re-program them for charity?

I have older KS5’s and currently use KS7’s and next year will be eligible for insurance coverage of new aids.

Related: A Guide to Paying for Hearing Aids34

Just learned something today while listing my aids to sell on Facebook Marketplace. Medical devices are a no no.
Could not list the aids there.