Phone Deals From a Store You Have Never Heard Of; Palm Pixi Phone

Palm Pixi Phones

Traditionally, mobile phone carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint don’t offer many Black Friday specials. After all, phones aren’t especially seasonal, and if you’ve got a two-year contract, unless you purchased the phone during the holidays originally, you’re not in the market now.

But that is not true of third-party phone marketers. These are companies that sell authorized phones and contracts for the big carriers, but often at prices lower than the big carriers. And they do offer Black Friday specials.

Take Wirefly for instance. You may not have heard of it, but it may be more familiar than you think. Wirefly provides Web services for Best Buy, Target, Radio Shack and others. If you buy a phone from Best Buy online, you are really getting it from Wirefly. Similarly, Wal-Mart’s phone deals come through an online seller, LetsTalk.com. Amazon.com has become very aggressive in mobile sales as well.

The obvious question is, “How can they sell phones for less than the carriers themselves, especially if they are selling the exact same product?”

Great question.

One reason, says Wirefly Chief Marketing Officer Scott Ableman, is a lack of consumer awareness. “The vast number of phones purchased in the United States are bought by people who walk into the store and don’t know they have another option,” he said. So the big carriers don’t have to discount because they don’t have to. And with exclusive deals on phones, choices appear even more limited—if you want an iPhone, you go to AT&T and take whatever deal you get.

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gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com