Amazon Recommerce, the service that buys your broken smartphone

Amazon Recommerce allows you to sell your smartphone to the e-commerce site, even if it's broken. Here's how it works

Amazon reinforces itself in the used market, where it is already present with Amazon Renewed, a section dedicated to reconditioned used products. Now comes also Amazon Recommerce, an interface through which anyone can try to sell their used smartphone. Even if broken.

The new service is called Amazon Recommerce and is brokered by a third party company, the French Recommerce Group (formerly Recommerce Solutions). Recommerce Group, in practice, will have the task of evaluating our used goods following the traditional canons of evaluation of companies that deal with collection and resale of used goods. The actual resale, however, will be done by Amazon. Those who have already sold a used cell phone to one of these companies, therefore, will find quite usual the procedure to sell to Amazon Recommerce. For all others, however, here's how it works.

How Amazon Recommerce works

The starting point for selling a used cell phone to Amazon Recommerce is to go to the page dedicated to the service where, first, we must enter the make, model or IMEI code of the device. The best thing to do is to enter only the brand and wait for the site to show the list of accepted cell phones produced by a specific company. Then we have to indicate in what condition the device is: perfect, good, damaged. Then we have to specify if the device turns on, if buttons and screen are working and, in case of iPhone, if "Find my iPhone" has been deactivated.

After entering all these data we will be given the maximum evaluation and we can accept it or not. If we accept it, we'll have to send the phone to Recommerce which will make, with the phone in hand, the final evaluation within 48 hours of receiving the smartphone. If everything goes smoothly, finally, the money arrives in our bank account. It is also possible to scrap your smartphone for free: it will be picked up at no cost by Recommerce.

Beyond Amazon Renewed

With Recommerce, Amazon thus goes beyond the already existing Renewed. In fact, the existing service doesn't allow ordinary users to send in used devices but is designed as a showcase for refurbishing companies. Then Amazon puts a one-year warranty and all its additional services on it. With Recommerce, however, Amazon also covers another slice of the used market: the one that before was totally in the hands of such companies or, even worse, managed by users with DIY sales on Facebook groups or used sites.