I like the ideas of reducing waste and saving money, but the refurb phone market has been a waste of time and money to me and I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
This began when I needed a laptop. After doing some research, I decided that Back Market was doing the best job in this area, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T480s from them and was absolutely delighted. Understand, though, that Back Market is only an aggregator for merchandise sold by other suppliers. They have an excellent website and they offer their own warranty on top of the supplier’s warranty, which assures your satisfaction.
Supposedly.
A few weeks later I needed to replace my wife’s mobile phone and went straight to Back Market and chose a Moto G. It arrived late, even though it had been sent via FedEx’s “2 day” arrangement. Once I got it open, I put a SIM card in and got a message saying something negative. As it turned out, the phone’s IMEI number was blacklisted. (Look it up.) Back Market required me to send them a photograph of the error message and a screenshot of the IMEI checker site that revealed it to be blacklisted. Finally satisfied, they sent me a shipping label so that I could return the unit to the supplier at no charge via UPS.
I was irked, so I immediately went to Amazon and ordered a similar refurb, knowing that Amazon had the clout to enforce their standards on any supplier. The phone came right away. It, too, was blacklisted. I had taken the time before ordering it to check the supplier’s reviews. Like the ones for the previous supplier, they were 80%-95% favorable. But they shipped a blacklisted phone.
I had to drop the project for a couple of weeks, but when I resumed it, I did a little investigation of these suppliers and the industry generally. All of the phone suppliers operate under aliases, it seems. They’ll call themselves something like “Southwest Suppliers,” but no such business appears in general listings. That name will have a one-page website saying “We do recycling” and provide a “contact form” you can write in if you wish — no phone number, no address. The return shipping labels (three, in total, as you will read shortly) always have a name and address that are new to me.
I saw that I was at sea without a compass, since everyone from Back Market to Best Buy to Amazon Renewed to eBay Refurbished, with everyone between, markets phones from these same suppliers. The suppliers, in turn, are doing so much business, they can have a 99.4% rating on, say, Amazon and yet you can look at the 0-1 star ratings and find the same stories over and over and over: shipped the wrong phone, advertised completely wrong description, different IMEIs on the box and phone, two numbers on the box, blacklisted phone, battery shot, phone locked. Apparently their quality control is abysmal because they are making such astronomical gobs of money, they have no time to do a good job.
I decided to use Back Market again, since I’m buying from the same pool of suppliers no matter where I turn. I chose a Moto G and carefully examined the reputation of the supplier. They looked good, so I gave it a try. They sent me a locked phone along with a computer printout from some test that certified that it was unlocked. You can’t even trust a robot these days.
Back Market was quick to settle the matter and send me a shipping label, but there was a twist even in that. Since my earlier experience, they have “improved” their contact system so that there’s no apparent way (and I searched for fifteen minutes) to write a message to anyone. Everything has been changed to “options.” What kind of problem are you having? They give you five choices. If none of them is true, you have to choose something false and hope to straighten it out down the line. But it leads to another set of options more false than the first. I lied my way through the tree until, when it was all over, they gave me a box in which I could add anything I wished to say. There I revealed the real problem.
Then I went back to Amazon and ordered a NEW Moto G for $10 more than Back Market’s price. I’m not saying that the specs are the same because, frankly, my wife uses her phone to place phone calls and to watch YouTube videos, so I pay no attention to the specs. My point is, I would gladly have laid down an extra $20 to avoid having to return three refurbished phones down at the UPS Store.
Until somebody steps up and decides to make a name for themselves with ruthless quality control, the refurb market is unacceptable. There’s a lot of good food in a garbage dump, but I wouldn’t go there to eat.