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Category: Amazon

My last day at Amazon & the Amazon Certified Refurbished program

Today is my last day! After more than 2,5 years at Amazon: launching the largest Electronic Sellers in Germany as well as overseeing the Certified Refurbished launch in Germany and program in general, I decided to commit myself to a new adventure.

I am really grateful for the possibility to work in such a great company, with so many smart and ambitious people. I had the opportunity to learn from and work with the best, to be challenged on my ideas and suggestions as well as to get the management´s trust of driving projects myself.

The last weeks, when it got announced that I will leave the company end of June I was often asked “why do you leave such an amazing company like Amazon?”, “are you completely crazy?“, „you will regret this decision” and many more questions or comments like these.

You can be ensured that I was asking myself the same questions hundreds of times before I resigned. I 100% agree that staying would be the more secure and easy choice! I had a regular income, was successful in my role and highly accepted in the company…so why leaving?!

The reason for my decision to leave Amazon can probably be found in my personality. I want to change things, I want to drive my idea forward and see the outcome…if my approach fails, just let me try another way to reach the goal! And exactly this is a problem in a company like Amazon! I don´t want to say Amazon is not innovative or driving ideas…no seriously Amazon for sure is one of the most innovative and driven cooperation in the world, don´t get me wrong, BUT it is still a cooperation! This means even if you have the best and coolest idea in the world on a topic, you normally cannot just do it…you must get the approval from the top. For some important decisions, this is even higher than the national (DE) or international (EU) level, it runs through the global decision chain (Seattle, US). After my experience that some of my ideas, suggestions and necessary improvements were not handled in a short timeframe, but instead only came on the “Roadmap 2019/20/21…”, I decided that I need a change….

And exactly this is where I am right now. At a new turning point. A new opportunity to maybe change something important. To make my personal contribution for a better world. I am really looking forward to what is in front of me, new opportunities, new ideas, new challenges! And I will invest all the capacity I have for driving my goal in the best possible way….

Stay tuned what it will be 🙂
Over and out! Hasta la vista!

Certified Refurbished public launch on Amazon.de

Refurbished Program Launch

Today is a very special day! After nearly a year of preperation, hunderts of phone conferences, meetings, up´s and down´s, night sessions and an overall exhausting workload, we finally made it!

Today we publicly lauched the program “Certified Refurbished” on Amazon in Germany:

Here you can find the Store Front of our actual refurbished product selection: https://www.amazon.de/Zertifiziert-Generalueberholt/b/ref=amb_link_212549467_2?ie=UTF8&node=10676131031

I am really proud of my team and all colleagues who have been participating and supporting to archieve this goal.

How does it all started?

I exactly remember the moment in January, when our DE Marketplace managament approached me and asked, if I would like to take over this new project as program lead DE, which focuses on refurbished products. As I always have been interested in the beauty of the environment (one of my favoite hobbies is traveling, especially to countries, which have a stunning landscape like Iceland or Myanmar) and have been aware that through the increasing consumption we destroy more and more of it, I was highly commited to take over this project.

In the first weeks I mainly focused on industry research. Personally I was not even aware what exactly “refurbishment” is. Where is the difference towards new or used? Or is it one of them? (I will go in further details of exactly this question in another post!)

In addition I did a deep dive on the program in the US, where it already was running successfully for nearly 2 years. It looks like that the mentality of the US society is more open-minded towars refurbished goods than the German, which is a bit surprisingly as the US people are often the example for beeing polluters with their big SUVs and crude oil production.

Customer Experience first

In the following months the main work was to adopt the US idea of the program to the German mentality and possibilites. I worked closely together with the leading industry players like AsGoodAsNew, reBuy or HandyDortmund – just to name a few – with the intention to create the best possible customer experience for this new product-condition on Amazon. This was and probably still is one of the hardest tasks, as Amazon is mainly the Marketplace for “new” products. I realized pretty early that it will not be possible for us to change the Amazon display for the program completly, so the condition “refurbished” get´s 100% clearly transmitted to each customer. For this reason we had to build some work-arounds, like extra product detail pages, special info widgets and a new title structure for the refurbished products to ensure that the customer understands what they are purchasing.

The public launch

In the last weeks we have now prepared the official public program launch in Germany by creating PR content, request advertisment space on the Amazon.de landing page as well as promotion events like special lightning deals.

Until now everything went smooth and we already received some great press articles covering the program launch (here an example from cnet: http://www.cnet.de/88166775/fuer-sparer-generalueberholte-produkte-auf-amazon/)!

Neverthless it is still day 1 and even as the public launch happened today, now it is time to make the program “Certified Refurbished” on Amazn even better than it is…

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