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…