Apple Pulls the Plug on Its eBay Store, No Longer Selling Refurbs for Less

While it became common knowledge amongst techy deal hunters that Apple was purportedly selling its own refurbished goods through a mysterious eBay store by the name of Refurbished-Outlet, dealnews discovered last month that several of these goods were less expensive than the Apple Store's own inventory. In a sense, Apple was undercutting Apple. Sweetening the deal even further, the storefront only collected sales tax for select states.

These discounts were music to an Apple-phile's ears, and word spread pretty quickly. However, given the fact that Apple has notoriously strict policies regarding its image and pricing, it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that this magical eBay store is no longer. As 9-to-5 Mac originally reported, the Refurbished-Outlet eBay store removed all of its products on Saturday and has since remained empty. Visiting the "home page" just redirects you to a list of frequently asked questions. It appears that this seeming experiment, which began in November 2012, is decidedly over.

All a cash-strapped Apple fan can do now is periodically refresh the page to see if maybe, just maybe, Refurbished-Outlet comes back to us, once again sporting all-time low prices on things like the 128GB 13.3" MacBook Air and 32GB and 64GB iPod touch players. But in the likely event that this doesn't happen, we can just learn to shop intelligently for Apple products, whether it be waiting patiently for that initial deal or perusing resellers and Apple's official refurb section for discounts.

Readers, did any of you manage to score one of the deals from the Apple eBay store before it went defunct? Do you think Apple pulled out once it became widely known that it was potentially undercutting its own Apple Store prices? Sound off in the comments below.

Front page photo credit: CNN Money