You can turn your old phones and unused tablets into cash in minutes by consulting our picks for the best places to sell electronics. The most challenging part is figuring out which service will pay the most for whatever it is you want to sell -- the second-hand consumer electronics market is more competitive than you'd imagine. Our recommendations can help you avoid having to meet potential buyers or deal with a back-and-forth negotiation, as you'd have to do with Facebook Marketplace or Swappa (although those are useful services).

There are plenty of companies where you can sell electronics, places that'll happily buy old fitness trackers, smartwatches, gaming consoles, laptops, digital cameras and other electronic equipment. In exchange, they'll send you cold hard cash, often in the form of a gift card or PayPal transfer -- not too shabby for that MacBook gathering dust in your closet. You can even sell your old electronics without having to visit a physical location such as a pawn shop, which is a bonus during the pandemic. And you won't have to worry about paying for shipping or shouldering the cost of a fee, which is somewhat commonplace with services that sell electronics and old equipment. 

The prices offered with trade-in programs on an old device are usually a little lower than what you could sell electronics for, but the reduced price is worth forgoing the headache of trying to sell on your own. Some places will even take broken items, of course at a much lower cost than a gadget that is still in good working order.

Read on to see the best places to sell electronics and gadgets, unless it's one of these seven used items -- those things you should probably never buy or sell.

Turn those old phones into cash.