Buy a Refurbished Phone: How the Whole Order Works, Step by Step

The first difference shows up before you even see a device. Refurbed and Back Market are marketplaces: several refurbishing partners sell under one roof, and your contract is with the individual seller rather than the platform. rebuy and asgoodasnew buy stock in, refurbish it themselves and sell it directly. Sounds like a technicality. It is not, because it decides who answers you later when something needs fixing.

The account question is more relaxed than most people expect. Refurbed states in its own FAQ that a customer account is optional and that you can order as a guest (as of 13 August 2026). For the other three, whether checkout strictly requires an account is not clearly settled on their public help pages. So we will not assert something we cannot show: each seller handles it in its own checkout flow, and you will see it in the basket at the latest.

An account is still worth having. Not for the newsletter, but because returns, tracking and warranty requests run through the customer area at all four sellers. Order as a guest and you will be hunting for an order number in a six-week-old email.

This is where it gets interesting, because this is where the real decision happens. The filters on a refurbished site look like the filters in any online shop, and they mean something different. "Zustand" (condition) is not a taste judgement. It is a commitment with a minimum specification behind it.

Here is an example you can go and read yourself. Refurbed lists four tiers (Premium, Exzellent, Sehr gut, Gut) and ties them in its own FAQ directly to battery health: at least 85 percent remaining capacity for smartphones, at least 80 percent for other device types, at least 90 percent for the Premium tier (as of 13 August 2026). One thing matters about that number: it is the seller's stated listing threshold, not a measurement of the specific unit that will reach you. Yours may sit above it. It should not sit below.

Back Market describes its three tiers (Gut, Sehr gut, Hervorragend) on its own quality page using visible-scratch distances. We could only view the exact wording through a search-engine snippet rather than confirm it word for word on the live page (as of 13 August 2026), so no centimetre figure appears here. The point survives anyway, and it is the most useful thing in this section: "Sehr gut" is not a standardised term. Two sellers are free to mean two different things by it, and they do.

What the tiers mean in detail, and how to translate them between sellers, is covered in our article on refurbished condition grades. For the ordering process one rule is enough: open the condition legend of the shop you are currently in and read it before you filter. Not the one you read last week somewhere else.

Storage works the opposite way, which is the good news. 128GB is 128GB whichever seller you are with. Colour likewise. Those two fields are the only ones where the label reliably means the same thing everywhere.

Put all four fields together and a real listing looks like this: an Apple iPhone 15 Pro with 128GB in titanium blue, offered by asgoodasnew in "sehr gut" condition. Model, storage, colour, condition tier. Four data points, and only all four together describe what you are ordering.

Apple iPhone 15 Pro 128GB Titan blau

Payment methods differ less than you might expect. All four sellers covered here carry Klarna in some form, which is no accident: anybody nervous about a several-hundred-euro device does not want to pay up front by bank transfer.

According to its own FAQ, Refurbed accepts Visa, Mastercard, Klarna, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal (as of 13 August 2026). rebuy lists Klarna as instant transfer, invoice and instalments, plus PayPal and credit card. asgoodasnew carries PayPal, PayPal Express, Amazon Pay and Klarna, and describes its instalment plan with a monthly minimum of one twenty-fourth of the purchase sum, and at least 6.95 euros (as of 13 August 2026). At Back Market the selection depends on the individual seller, since several merchants share the same storefront.

One note that has nothing to do with refurbished specifically and belongs here anyway. The Verbraucherzentrale, Germany's consumer advice organisation, explicitly advises against paying in advance or through private transfer functions when buying used tech online, and recommends payment routes that carry buyer protection (as of 13 August 2026). With a certified retailer that has a proper legal notice, the risk is small anyway. With an offer that nudges you off a marketplace and into a private bank transfer, it is not.

And a piece of arithmetic on instalments that almost nobody says out loud: a 24-month plan on a device whose warranty runs 12 months means you spend the second half of the term paying off something with no voluntary warranty left. Statutory liability for defects still applies (more on that in step 5), but you should know the sum before you sign it.

A device in exactly that price bracket, where the instalment question becomes realistic, would be a Samsung Galaxy S24+ with 256GB in amber yellow at asgoodasnew, in "sehr gut" condition.

Samsung Galaxy S24+ 256GB amber yellow

Not much drama happens between order and parcel, and yet this is the step where expectations collide most often.

First, shipping cost. Refurbed states that shipping is included in the sale price. At Back Market it varies by seller and is shown in the information field of each individual offer (as of 13 August 2026). For rebuy and asgoodasnew we did not pull the shipping-cost rules in detail for this article, so no figure appears here that we have not checked. It will be on screen in checkout before you confirm.

Second, packaging. A refurbished device usually does not arrive in the manufacturer's original box but in a neutral carton from the refurbisher. That is not a defect, it is the normal case, and it is also why the photos in many listings are stock images rather than the actual unit.

Third, accessories, and this is where returns get started. Exactly what sits in the box, particularly whether a charging cable or a power adapter is included, varies between sellers and sometimes between individual offers from the same seller. There is no universal answer, and we did not find one for this article that would hold up. The Verbraucherzentrale guide on refurbished and second-hand buying advises checking the stated scope of delivery before purchase for precisely this reason (as of 13 August 2026). A screenshot of the product page costs you five seconds and is your best evidence in a dispute.

Laptops add a fourth item: power supply and port layout. An Apple MacBook Pro 2021 in the 14" size with M1 Pro, 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory in space grey, listed at asgoodasnew in "sehr gut" condition, is a good illustration of how many separate claims hide inside a single product name. Every one of them belongs on your checklist when the box is open in front of you.

Apple MacBook Pro 2021 14" M1 Pro 8-Core CPU | 14-Core GPU 1 TB SSD 16 GB space grau

This is the section almost nobody writes in this form, so it runs longer than the rest.

Every retailer advertises its own return window. 21 days, 30 days, sometimes more. What gets lost is that there is a legal floor underneath, and nobody can negotiate it away. The statutory Widerrufsrecht (right of withdrawal) for online purchases is 14 days, as § 355 BGB sets out; for a contract of sale over goods the clock starts when you receive them (as of 13 August 2026). You need no reason. No "changed my mind", no explanation, nothing.

Here is what the four sellers add on top, voluntarily:

All figures as of 13 August 2026, each taken from the seller's own linked page. We could only view rebuy's 40-euro threshold through a search-engine snippet rather than confirm it on the returns page itself, so treat that one figure with a little caution.

Now the second distinction, which goes wrong even more often than the first. Warranty and statutory liability for defects are not the same thing.

Gewährleistung (statutory liability for defects) comes from the law. It runs two years on new goods and may be contractually shortened to one year for used goods, as § 476 BGB provides, as long as the buyer is told beforehand and the shortening is expressly agreed (as of 13 August 2026). It applies whether or not the seller promises anything extra. It also still applies once a voluntary warranty has long expired.

Garantie (voluntary warranty) is a promise. The 12, 30 or 36 months in the table above come from the retailer, not from a statute, and the retailer sets duration, scope and exclusions itself. asgoodasnew, for instance, ties its 30 months to registering the device within 30 days. Forget that and you lose the advertised extra, though never your statutory rights.

Which one covers what, and which damage types typically sit outside a warranty, is laid out in our warranty guide for refurbished devices. And since EU-level rules are moving on this right now, the piece on the EU right to repair 2026 and the warranty extension is worth a look.

For practical purposes, remember one order of precedence: 14 days of no-reason withdrawal, then the seller's own window, underneath both the statutory liability that keeps running, and on top the voluntary warranty for as long as it lasts.

That withdrawal window is not a goodwill gesture. It is your inspection period, so use it instead of leaving the device in its box for three weeks.

The Verbraucherzentrale recommends checking condition, accessories and return deadlines when buying used tech online, and paying attention to whether listing photos show the actual unit or a stock image (as of 13 August 2026). Turn that into a list and half an hour clears it:

• Compare the condition against the description you saw at purchase. Against the description, not against your memory of it.

• Check the contents against the product page. If something is missing, that is the moment to raise it, not four weeks later.

• Read out the battery health. On iPhones under Settings, Battery, Battery Health; on Android it sits in diagnostic menus or an app depending on the maker. Compare the value against what the seller promised.

• Work through every port and sensor. Charging socket, speakers, both microphones, every camera, Wi-Fi and mobile data. On laptops add the keyboard, the trackpad and each individual port.

• Note the IMEI or serial number and check whether any residual manufacturer warranty is still running. On very recent stock that happens more often than people assume.

• Check for an activation lock. A device still tied to somebody else's account goes straight back.

Why the battery line is the most important one is covered in our article on battery quality in refurbished devices. If you specifically ordered an iPhone, the refurbished iPhone buying tips add a device-specific layer to this list.

A word on expectations that should be reassuring. Stiftung Warentest, Germany's independent consumer testing foundation, actually ordered and assessed 45 devices for a purchase test across nine shops, weighting device quality at 65 percent and information plus order handling at 35 percent. Six of the nine shops scored "gut", and one refurbished Galaxy S20 came in more than 300 euros below a new unit (published 22 February 2023, testing carried out October 2022 to January 2023; this restatement as of 13 August 2026). The test is no longer fresh, and it is still the only independent material of that scale in the German market.

Tablets, incidentally, have a shorter checklist than phones, because mobile radio and part of the sensor set drop out. An Apple iPad Pro 11" Wi-Fi 2024 with the M4 chip and 256GB in space black, listed at asgoodasnew in "wie neu" condition, is one of those: display, battery, speakers, charging port, camera, done.

Apple iPad Pro 11" Wi-Fi 2024 (M4) 256GB space schwarz

Now the part people dread, which in practice turns out to be remarkably dull.

The first move in any return shipping is always the same: tell the seller what is wrong, in writing. At Refurbed that runs through the customer area using the "contact seller" function with a stated return reason, after which the seller provides a prepaid label (as of 13 August 2026). At Back Market you start it in your account through the help area, and the seller responds within one working day per the company's own figures. rebuy works with a returns portal and a label. asgoodasnew takes the request through a contact form with your order number and emails the DHL label back.

The second move is the question that shapes everything after it: withdrawal or defect?

A withdrawal needs no justification. You dislike the colour, the display feels too small, you simply changed your mind. Inside the 14 days under § 355 BGB, and correspondingly longer at the three sellers with a 30-day window, you send it back and get your money.

A defect is a different animal and gets handled differently. Statutory liability applies, and so does the voluntary warranty if one exists. In that warranty claim, the right of withdrawal no longer applies, only the individual seller's own terms from the Step 5 table above. What follows varies: Refurbed names repair, and failing that a replacement of equal or higher value. Back Market describes repair or replacement within five working days with free return shipping. rebuy names repair or a refund. asgoodasnew decides at its own discretion between repair, replacement and refund per its own warranty terms (all figures as of 13 August 2026).

How long any of it takes is not something every seller publishes. asgoodasnew states a refund within seven working days; rebuy states up to nine working days as a rule, and ten to fourteen working days for a statutory defect case on electronics. For Refurbed we found no dependable processing time, so we are not inventing one.

A complaint runs like this using asgoodasnew as the worked example, since its flow is the most tightly documented: fill in the contact form with the order number, receive the DHL label by email, drop the parcel off, wait for the refund. Three actions and a waiting period. Which is largely why the question "what if it does not fit" feels so much bigger than it turns out to be.

One last practical habit that saves arguments: photograph the device and the packed carton before you send it back. Not out of suspicion, but because transport damage on the return leg is otherwise hard to attribute.

The process to buy a refurbished phone is identical whichever of the four sellers you end up with: account, filter, payment, delivery, inspection window, back it goes if needed. What differs is the numbers around it, and those differ a lot. 21 versus 30 days to return. 12 versus 36 months of warranty. Free return shipping with or without a threshold attached.

The sentence worth keeping from all of this is a different one, though. You always have the 14 days from § 355 BGB, and statutory liability for defects keeps running long after the advertised warranty has expired. Anything a seller promises beyond that is a sales argument. Often a good one, and still a voluntary one.

That leaves the question of which offer wins. Which is exactly what we do at Refurbito: we put the certified sellers' offers side by side, sorted by price, condition tier and warranty length. Look at the same model in the same condition across several sellers before you order. The difference rarely sits where you expect it.