Amazon Resale Warehouse Deals: What You Need To Know Before You Buy
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
When buying products online, particularly when looking for deals on electronics that aren't entirely brand new, there's a complicated web of overlapping and often non-standard terminology that consumers must navigate through. How, for example, do you distinguish the differences between used, open box, and refurbished items, much less synonyms of refurbished like "reconditioned," "renewed," and the like? That not every store has the same definition for these terms complicates everything, requiring you to look into, for example, what qualifies for the Amazon Renewed program. That's not even the full extent of "official" secondhand items at Amazon alone, with there also being Amazon Pre-Owned Certified and, perhaps most famously, Amazon Resale, which changed its name from Amazon Warehouse in late June 2024.
Unlike Amazon Renewed and Amazon Pre-Owned Certified, Amazon Resale isn't exclusively for electronics; it's for any kind of return that Amazon deems suitable for resale. Official Resale categories include furniture, pet supplies, non-food grocery items, baby products, outdoor recreation, and lawn/garden supplies. However, you should keep an eye out for other categories as well. Effectively, it's not that different from what most retailers would sell as "open box" returns and, if the condition isn't quite good as new, "scratch and dent." However, Amazon complicates matters by listing Amazon Resale as a separate seller from Amazon.com and classifying all of its wares as "used." Let's take a look at what exactly that means and how it should impact your purchase decisions.
Amazon Resale has four different condition grades for its items
To help distinguish exactly what you're getting for your money, Amazon Resale has four different condition grades for what it sells. The most attractive one is, of course, "Like New." Under this heading, the product works perfectly with no signs of wear and includes all accessories, but might come in packaging with minor damage or be repackaged in a generic box. "Very good" might show minor wear such as "small scratches or cosmetic blemishes" and could point to certain accessories being missing. However, in the event of missing accessories, the listing will always lay out what they are. "Good" could indicate further blemishes, "cosmetic damage," or "identifying markings," while also potentially missing some of the originally included parts, accessories, manuals, or assembly tools. Finally, there's "Acceptable," which Amazon describes as "fairly worn" while still working the way it's supposed to. These more significant bits of damage could include worn down corners, scratches, and dents, and these "Acceptable" items could also be missing more bundled items than a "Good" counterpart would.
As with any purchase of non-new products, you have to weigh exactly what the trade-off between the price and the condition means to you. You have 30 days to return the product if you're not satisfied, regardless. However, it's also important to keep in mind that outside of the 30-day guarantee, these are supported about as well as garage sale or thrift shop finds.
Amazon Resale products don't come with warranties
If you're going into buying from Amazon Resale cold, then, at first glance, you're probably using similar offerings from Amazon's competitors as a benchmark for what kind of support is to be expected. This is effectively Amazon's open box arm, and arguably its biggest competitor in the electronics space, Best Buy, explicitly promises a full manufacturer's warranty with its open box returns regardless of the condition. Even smaller competitors, like specialty electronics catalog vendor Crutchfield, ensure that you'll have a full manufacturer's warranty on not just open box items, but also those labeled as "scratch and dent." By all rights, you'd expect Amazon to stand behind its similarly situated products the same way. In practice, though? They don't.
The main Amazon Resale page is explicit that "Used products generally do not come with a manufacturer's warranty." If you think about it from the manufacturer's point of view, it becomes easier to understand why this is. Look at it this way: Amazon.com may be listed as an authorized reseller list for a company like Sony, but Amazon Resale isn't. If you were to try to get warranty service and submitted your receipt, Sony would see a purchase from a third-party Amazon seller that isn't in its reseller network. That the items are explicitly listed as "used" and not "open box" or "new (open box)" surely doesn't help matters, either. So if you want the peace of mind of a warranty, you need to buy one separately.
Is Amazon Resale worth buying from?
Whether or not Amazon Resale is worth buying electronics from comes down entirely to the price and what other deals may be available for what you're looking to purchase, whether new or in the larger refurbished ecosystem away from Amazon. For example, let's look at the base model (256GB storage/8GB RAM/13.6 inch display) of Apple's M3 MacBook Air. Retailing for $1099.00, Amazon Resale has it for as low as $919.08. Already, that's not necessarily a big enough discount to justify getting an expensive computer without a warranty. This becomes even more obvious when you see that, as of this writing, both Amazon and Best Buy are selling it new on sale for $999.00 and Apple's official refurbished store has it for $929.00, complete with the same warranty as new. In that case, no, Amazon Resale is not worth the hassle at all.
Alternatively, we can look at The Wirecutter's pick for the best all-purpose AV receiver, the Denon AVR-X1800H, which retails for $749.99 but generally sells for about $500.00 to $600.00 new at Amazon. As of this writing, its listing includes Amazon Resale deals starting at $474.09. With the official Denon outlet offering refurbs (at a one-year warranty instead of two) for $549.00, there's some value to be had here. That gets to the heart of the matter: It's all about how deep the discount is relative to what else is available, so only buy from Amazon Resale when the savings blow away the alternatives.