All About Refurbished

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Tag: certified refurbished

What exactly is refurbishment and refurbished?

One of the questions I have been challenged the most with during the last months has been “What exactly is refurbishment and who is doing it?

I have to say it is a valid question! Nowadays the term “refurbishment” is not really established in our vocabulary or society in general.

So what is refurbishment?

The term refurbishment means something has been repaired, cleaned, and made to look new again.

The phrase “look new again” mainly makes the difference to a classic “used” product, which usually has signs of usage.

In the past, refurbishment has primarily be used in the term of a renovation, i.e. of a building, but it is also used in a technical manner. In this case next to the “repaired, cleaned and made to look new again” attributes of the word, we would also add tested to function like-new.

Summarizing the meaning of the word “refurbishment” in a context of technical products it would be something like “a product which has been repaired, cleaned, tested to function and look like-new“!

As you now know what refurbishment is, probably the next question that you have is….

What kind of products can be refurbished?

Overall you can say that all products, which have electronic and technical contents can be refurbished: Phones, drilling machines, notebooks, kitchen devices, hair dryers, watches, etc.!

Nevertheless the most common refurbished goods nowadays are smartphones, tablets and notebooks. Especially products, which have a high selling price as the price difference compared to a “new” product makes a real difference, often up to 50%.

Who is refurbishing the products?

There are mainly 3 different ways how a product is refurbished:

  1. A small amount of manufacturers are refurbishing their products themselves (i.e. Apple)
  2. Many manufacturers are using large authorized refurbishers, who refurbish their products with an official manufacturer authorization (i.e. Microsoft)
  3. And the last group are third-party refurbishers, which are refurbishing products with their own capabilities, but without any official authorization (often through trade-in programs)

In general you can say that for nearly no brand there is only one of the above ways existing, which means that for example an refurbished Apple iPhones on the market can come from each one of the above 3 different refurbishment sources.

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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