Refurbished Condition Grades Compared: What Like New, Very Good and Good Mean at Refurbed, Back Market and rebuy

Worth setting the scene, because otherwise this reads like somebody's being sneaky. There's no regulator, no standards body and no trade association defining what "Very good" means on a refurbished smartphone.

Toby Stubbington, Managing Director at Pier Insurance, put it this way to Mobile News: grading has evolved organically, without top-down standardisation. He reckons a voluntary industry framework is more realistic than waiting for regulation, though it keeps stalling on small things like cross-border consistency and the cost of certification.

It doesn't stop at being untidy, either. Bas De Vries, COO at Amac, told Fixably that inconsistent condition criteria are "the most common problem in the used devices market", feeding straight into return rates and poor ratings. Most people who send a device back haven't been scammed. They read a scale and assumed it was universal.

That matters more than it used to, because this stopped being a niche a while ago. The Recommerce Group barometer 2026, a Kantar survey of 7,750 respondents across 13 European countries in January 2026, puts second-hand smartphone ownership at 18% of Europeans and 23% in Germany. 55% say their next phone will come from a professional refurbisher.

So a lot of buying decisions rest on a word that changes meaning between tabs.

Here's the table this whole piece exists for. Every row comes from that retailer's own condition page, linked and dated.

Look at the fourth column. That's the whole story in one row.

Refurbed: four tiers, and the only battery figure at every one

Per Refurbed's own condition page, retrieved 27.08.2026, "Good" means the housing may show visible signs of use while the powered-on display must show no visible scratches. On smartphones that comes with a battery capacity floor of at least 85%.

The second half is the real differentiator. Refurbed ties a technical minimum to every cosmetic tier, not just to the expensive one. At "Premium" the floor moves to at least 90%.

Whether that gets policed more strictly than anywhere else, I genuinely can't tell you. All I have are the published criteria, and on this specific point they're more concrete than the other two.

Back Market: five tiers down to three

Back Market rebuilt its rating system, and the page carries the date 29.05.2026. Five categories became three: "Good", "Very good" and "Excellent". The stated reason is transparency plus a higher minimum bar, with every device sold having to clear at least "Good" according to the company's own claim.

For the top tier, Back Market names a viewing distance of over 20 cm at which no signs of use should be visible. That's an unusually testable thing to publish, and I like it, because you can actually reproduce it.

And the battery? Devices flagged "Premium" carry at least 90% capacity plus a 25-point inspection. Below that, the condition page names no percentage. Two of three tiers stay silent on it.

rebuy: four tiers, and the softest cosmetic bar at "Good"

According to rebuy's official help centre article on electronics, retrieved 27.08.2026, rebuy separates four tiers: "Like new", "Very good", "Good" and "Heavily used". At "Very good", individual heavier scratches or impact marks on the back or frame are possible. At "Good", scratches on the display that you can feel with a fingernail are possible.

That's exactly where the gap opens. Refurbed requires a scratch-free powered-on display for the same word. rebuy permits felt scratches in that precise spot. Both are accurate, both are published, and both are called "Good".

No battery percentage appears on the public electronics condition page.

Now the part none of the three volunteers at the top of the page.

Battery health doesn't hang off the label

The most common assumption in refurbished buying: a tidy housing means a fresh battery. A survey published in the International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology in May 2026 names a common threshold of at least 80% battery capacity for renewed portable devices, alongside certified data wiping and full functional testing as the baseline.

Two of the three retailers here publish no such number outside their top flag. You end up buying a cosmetic score and hoping about the rest. Our battery platform comparison 2026 breaks down where each retailer actually stands on this.

In practice, that means looking for a percentage in the individual listing text rather than inferring one from the tier. If none is there, the question is open. Not answered, just open.

And even where a figure does appear, it's the retailer's floor for the classification, not a measurement taken on the specific unit heading to your door.

Cosmetic isn't the same as functional

All three scales fold two things into one word: how the device looks, and how it works. On looks, the criteria are readable. On function, most of what you get is a statement that testing happened.

Then there's the human factor. Users in the Apfeltalk forum have reported gaps between their own assessment and the grade actually assigned, sometimes downward, sometimes upward. That thread runs from 2016 into 2017, so it's genuinely old, and I'm citing it only as evidence that this is structural rather than new. A hairline mark one inspector waves through is a visible scratch to the next.

Which is why the return window deserves at least as much of your attention as the condition tier.

No verdict, and no recommendation for one retailer over another. We compare offers, we sell nothing ourselves, and we test no devices. What follows is a decision aid organised around what the phone is actually for.

The examples below come from asgoodasnew, another seller with, yes, its own separate scale again. The labels "new", "like new", "very good" and "budget" are the wordings used in each listing itself. All prices as of 27.08.2026, and both prices and availability shift constantly.

Second phone, workshop phone, tight budget

If the device lives in the car, works as a sat-nav or comes along to a building site, looks are the first thing you can drop. A Xiaomi 14 Ultra with 512 GB sits there under the "budget" label at 499 € (as of 27.08.2026), despite carrying twice the storage of the Galaxy model that's about to show up three times below. Keep that number in mind and watch what the same Galaxy costs at each tier, the gap will make more sense once you've seen all three.

[product:44371002277]

This is the tier where the differences between retailers bite hardest. Read the listing description here properly, not just the label.

The daily phone: one step below the cosmetic top

For the handset that lives in your pocket and picks up its own marks within a month anyway, the second-best cosmetic tier is usually the sensible call. A Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with 256 GB in titanium gray carries the "very good" label at 679 € (same date as above).

[product:44253739307]

Hold on to that number, because the same phone shows up twice more in a moment.

When looks genuinely matter

A gift, a company handset, or you're simply the sort of person a display scratch will bother every single day. Then the upper tier earns its keep. That same Galaxy S25 Ultra with 256 GB costs 709 € under the "like new" label (unchanged).

[product:40580404747]

So 30 € buys you a cosmetic tier. At that margin I'd take it, personally. On other models the gap is far wider, so I'd work it out per device instead of turning it into a rule of thumb.

And when "new" is the more honest answer

There's a point where the maths flips. The same model, again 256 GB titanium gray, sits at 819 € as "new" (also unchanged).

[product:45135299325]

That's 140 € above the "very good" tier and 110 € above "like new". Whether a full manufacturer warranty and an untouched battery are worth that depends on how long you plan to keep the thing. Over two years I find it a genuinely hard call. Over five, much less so.

Not a system, just the order I read things in:

1. I open the shop's condition page first, not the product page. The definition is almost never in the listing.
2. Then I search that page for the word "display". That's where the scales separate, because it's the one surface you stare at all day.
3. Next, a search for a percent sign. No percent sign means the battery isn't part of the promise.
4. After that I check whether the page carries a date at all. Back Market prints one, the other two don't, which is what makes re-reading at purchase time necessary.
5. And last, the return window, since it's the only protection you have against a grade you'd have assigned differently.

Five things, and number four is the one I used to skip.

"Good" isn't a quality verdict. It's a word with three separate house meanings. Put refurbished condition grades compared side by side and that's the whole takeaway: same label, different floor. Until a standard shows up, and going by the industry voices quoted above that isn't imminent, the reading is on you.

Annoying? Sure. But it's two minutes, and the difference between a scratch-free display and one you can feel with a fingernail lives inside those two minutes.

So compare the definition behind the price, not just the price. The rest is preference.