Is phone and mobile repair with investing in?

[gazman]

Wondering if investing time and money into phone and tablet repair its worth it?It sure looks like a saturated market.

 

[phaZed]

From what I have gathered from the forums here is that it depends on where you live (at the moment). In my city there are phone and tablet repair shops all over and they are dirt-cheap... screen replacements for $60-90, so it's not worth my time. That being said.. in smaller towns without such shops I imagine you could be successful if you have enough volume.

The problem I see is this.. following technology closely, prices have nowhere to go but down for devices. New 3DXPoint and VRAM options are going to destroy current memory and storage costs and many more single-board or SOC (System on a Chip) with quad and 8 cores with higher clocks and lower power use are on the way.
What I'm babbling on about is this: in the very near future (1-3 years) it's not going to make sense repairing them at all, it's almost there now. It's going to be a short lived endeavor at best, IMO.

 

[Markverhyden]

Moore's Law. Been watching it's progress for over 40 years. While there are many benefits one of them is not job security/business growth opportunities.

 

[Tech Savvy]

I used to work at a kiosk in my early years of college, they made good money because they were paying kids like me 15$/hr to fix phones all day. And that kind of repair is an impulse repair. Majority, 70% or so if I had to guess, of the customers we got their plan wasn't to go to the mall specifically to get their phone fixed. But possibly a walking by and having an impulse to fix it on the spot. Also, we did these all day long. On Fridays Saturdays I would fix about 20-25 just by myself and we had two guys working those days. So you can imagine the cash flow at 80-120$ a pop while only paying 15$/hr and 15$/ screen. Depending on the phone it would take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to do, half hour for an iPad (150$) but again the main traffic was coming from impulse and we did it all day so the time spent doing it was very low and error rate was low too. Doing that intermittently would take longer to do a repair especially if you have to be extra careful if you're rusty.

Bottom line for a repair shop if you think you have the numbers to do a couple a day then absolutely, but one or two a week I wouldn't. It's not worth the time or liability.


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[River Valley Computer]

We, in our thirst to make more money, tried the mobile devices repair for a while. Ughhhhhhh, not fun.

We tried tablet repair and cell phone repair.

1. Could not get good quality replacement parts no matter what we paid and when we would find a company with good parts in a few months they weren't good.

2. We didn't like the pressure of the customer waiting for their valuable phone that they couldn't be without for even a couple hours.

3. They would constantly complain that it is to expensive.

4. We bought all the expensive equipment that you need for heating the digitizers to get them off, the micro soldering equipment to replace components and charging ports.

5. Ipad repair while not as time sensitive to customers they didn't like to wait much more than a day or two - they have to get back on Twitter or Facebook or their life would end.

We finally decided to pull the plug on mobile equipment repair. I found a shop that does ONLY cell phone and tablet repair - set up a gentlemens agreement with them - we send all cell phone customers to them - they give us 20%. For tablet repairs we will check it in and hand carry them to them on Tues and Thurs (only 2 miles away). For a Ipad digitizer they charge us $50, we charge to customer $90. the going rate around here is $120-140 for most Ipad digitizer replacements.

They also refer any computer repair such as LCD replacements to us and we do the same 20% for them. A win-win.

While we do have numerous PC business cleints who are time critical, it is a lot different that a 18 year old all pissy because they have to wait an hour for their phone repair.

 

[Matthew Bradley]

There is a special place in heaven for mobile repair techs. It's a *completely* different clientele. The work is tedious and the pay is awful. Back in my 20's I worked at a Radio Shack. For the most part it was a good job. People were nice. However we also were big into car audio products. Slim margins and the customer base was a night and day difference. Wouldn't listen to reason. Patience of rabid mongoose. At the end of the day, you'd want to jump into the shower, crawl into a fetal position and let the day wash off of you. Mobile repair is the new car audio.

 

[Jhenry]

agree with most here. We tried it for a few years just mainly doing apple products, and it was impossible to stay competitive with the mobile only shops/kiosks, so we pulled the plug

 

[Diggs]

And watch out if you even put a scuff mark on the case when splitting it. I like the Register's term "Fondleslab". People fondle their phones and god help you if you even scratch that case when you pry it open it.

Not me. Done a few. Won't go there again.

 

[sapphirescales]

ONLY iPhone and iPad repairs. They're quick and easy. But you have to charge a good margin, even if you won't get the job because you're more expensive than anyone else in town. If we can get $50 profit off 30 minutes work, that's a good deal. Any less than that though and it just doesn't make any sense. In fact, we've recently partnered with another repair shop that's less than 1 mile away from us. At the end of the day we take any iPhones or iPads that we've gotten in and they rush them through after hours for us. Charge us 1/2 of their normal rate. So an iPad glass repair costs us about $40 for them to do, and we charge $150. $90 profit isn't too bad. Do a few of those a day and you're doing pretty well. But it isn't worth it for us to do 30 minutes of work for $20 in profit ($40 for our partner to do it minus $20 for the glass if we do it ourselves). I honestly don't know how ANYONE makes it in mobile repair without selling a whole lot of high margin items (cases, screen protectors, chargers, etc.).

 

[Bamus]

I do mobile and tablet repairs but only advertise it to my business clients. I offer them a loaner if they want while I fix their phone (just so they can call and text and not drop off the social radar) so I can fix the device in between other jobs.

I buy quality parts (oh so important) and bill them what I feel is fair. Which is probably double of what small quick-fix shops ask. In return they get a good repair: no glas that shatters when they put their phone in their purse, no digitizers that stop working after an IOS update, no lifting frames, iPad frames that have been cleaned thoroughly so the new glass doesn't lift and a decent warranty.

As stated above, iPhone and iPads only as they are fairly painless to repair. Unfortunately you'll find that for other brands you will have less choice in parts. Parts that are usually very expensive and the devices are much more time consuming to fix. On top of that you get weird issues after repairs on a fair share of them (I'm looking at you Galaxy S7).

 

[JPoodle]

We did iCracked for a while but in our market it was sometimes a challenge. It was saturated with techs and you had to be in the app hawking people. I have tried doing it via Craigslist. Like others have said it is a different clientele that wants it done yesterday and cheap. I also tried offering a mobile service where you go to the customer and charge a little extra that proved to be hardly worth it.I am sure there is money to be made but you would have to pay a college kid or very mature teenager to do the labor and oversee in a retail or chain to make it worth the time. Replacing digitizers forget it unless you do it all the time. I would make the customer change the entire LCD assembly to cut labor in transferring components and keep their broken screen and good components. Above all make sure you test EVERYTHING before opening the phone and document to CYA. I cannot stress this enough. Had an employee who cost us alot of money by not doing this properly and us having to eat earpieces, light sensors, cameras or headphone jacks that we could not prove were broken before hand.

 

[NviGate Systems]

Unless you keep hearing customers saying they wish someone did repairs like that etc., avoid it. It gets really costly if you make a mistake and customers expect way too much and want it NOW.

I do the odd one (iPad/iPhone) but it's kinda not worth it when I can make twice/three times the revenue on a laptop repair where I can justify my prices and how I do my work. If you become the do it all shop you can lose focus on your primary revenue stream and the time spent on expanding to new services takes away from your other customers which may hurt business. Plus if you are a small shop I find iPad/iPhone repair is a while you wait thing, that's why these small shops are so good at it, rarely does a device stay for longer than a few hours so for them that's all they do so it's easy to juggle it. But if you are a one or two man show juggling phone calls, questions, virus cleanups, repairs plus trying to get a screen replaced while not making a mistake...yeah..really think hard before doing it.

If you really want to do some...stick to iPhone 5 and up, those screens come out reasonably quickly and don't suck too much of your time. Most of the time. ;-)

 

[kwest]

I disagree. We started doing phone and tablet repair 2 years ago. They are a pain and there isn't a large margin but they are a way to introduce what we offer in computer repair. At this point we do at least 5 mobile devices a day and we get them back when they have a computer issue. Plus I make $1000 a month selling the broken oem screens.

Well worth it but you have to have them in stock and drop everything when they want them fixed.

 

[NviGate Systems]

The store I work at has only two techs and I'm the only one that does advanced repairs so for us, ain't worth it, but for others it might be ok. Try it and see. Use cookie jar insurance for when something breaks.

 

[MichaelEC]

Mine is limited to major brand tablet repair. Battery replacement and screen replacement is quite profitable for me and I will work on any I can get parts for.

I don't do cell phones. Too small for me to work on anymore and the eyes are getting old.

The thing about a tablet is, if there are photos, documents, or music, stored on the internal memory and it's important enough to the customer cost is usually not a consideration. They want that stuff and they can't get it with a toasted battery or a dead screen.

 

[johnrobert]

you need good eyesight

I tried to replace my own iPhone 4 charger dock said it was supposed to be easy I did not think so
took me forever to get home button ribbon back in
battery and screen yes

 

[mr m]

Moore's Law. Been watching it's progress for over 40 years. While there are many benefits one of them is not job security/business growth opportunities.

Same here. I remember chip chasing, 16K CORE RAM, paper tape and no hint of plug and play. You set an address and vector with jumpers that were sometimes located all over the modules and you needed a schematic to find them. Then the DIP switch appeared and I realized this was the beginning of the end for the electronics repair tech.

Anyway, Moore's Law has been spot on with speeds, capacities and power doubling but I think it hit the proverbial wall with CPU clock speeds. 4.0 GHz seems to be as fast as they go for air cooled PC's. The transistors are so small and running so hot I think they have reached their limit. Multicores allow Moore's rule to remain true but the doubling of transistors every two years on the processor chip is over for the PC. Super computers still have a ways to go because of their physical size and cooling tricks.

To the OP, even though I'm six months late with a response, I'm not getting involved in phone or tablet repair. Just like the shoe man, TV or appliance repairman, it will soon enough be cheaper to replace.

 

[lan101]

To the OP, even though I'm six months late with a response, I'm not getting involved in phone or tablet repair. Just like the shoe man, TV or appliance repairman, it will soon enough be cheaper to replace.

Yeah I had a vizio tv that was 4 years old. A few months back it just wouldn't turn on. I looked into it. It was like a possibility of being 3 different things. If I guessed wrong the first 2 times I'd have like $225 roughly in parts. I decided to spend $300 on amazon for a brand new LG 42 inch LED tv. The vizio was a 37 inch lcd. If I had tv repair experience I may have went ahead and did the repair but opted not to. I suppose there's still money on the upper end tv's fixing them, but that's a niche market in certain areas I'm sure.