This article is a guest post written by Ben Petersen, Head of New Business Development U.S. at Back Market, a SellerActive partner.
Back Market is one of the fastest growing eCommerce Marketplaces in the world today, and is built entirely around the rapidly growing used and refurbished electronics market, a market that is projected to reach $44 Billion in size by 2027, according to performance market research. Founded in France in 2014, Back Market is active in 8 countries including the U.S, France, the UK, Germany, and several other Western European countries. In 2020, Back Market announced its Series C round of funding of $120 million dollars, with lead investor Goldman Sachs. These funds will be used to fuel its continued marketing investment, to grow its seller services, and expand to new geographies. The U.S. is Back Market's biggest growth market, and is currently growing at a rate of more than 600% YoY.
What Makes Back Market Different from other marketplaces?
Back Market’s chief mission is to generate mainstream appeal for used and refurbished tech devices in particular. The three main strategies used to accomplish this are:
1) Working only with high quality & professional sellers: Back Market is a Business-to-Consumer marketplace, meaning it cuts out the peer to peer transactions seen on sites like eBay or Swappa, and is able to deliver consistent quality since all sellers use rigorous functional tests on their devices, and back their products with a defect warranty. This filters out many bad actors who sell poor quality products, and those that create downward pressure on price.
2) A clean user-experience, and a tailored marketing strategy: by providing a clean, painless U.X, and focusing on the ecological benefits of buying refurbished, Back Market is able to convert new consumers to buying refurbished. In fact, 64% of customers on Back Market have never purchased used or refurbished products before, and the primary reason they buy is because of the attractive layout and quality reassurance on the website.
3) A Buybox algorithm that promotes high quality sellers: Sellers who are able to deliver consistently better customer experiences will rank higher at the buybox and can command higher pricing. The result is that key metrics like defective rates, on-time shipping, or wrong-product rates continue to improve as the best-quality sellers grow and thrive on the website.
Requirements to start selling Back Market:
- The Right Products: Back Market is a good fit for sellers with used and refurbished consumer electronics, including smartphones, tablets, computers, and audio products. But it's also a growing channel for other categories such as wearables, home appliances, and power tools.
- Rigorous Testing and Diagnostics: Back Market is designed for sellers with a rigorous quality control process, and sellers must offer a defect warranty on all devices sold.
- After-Sales Customer Service: While Back Market does manage all pre-sales customer service, the seller must have a team of customer service agents to manage after-sales customer requests within 1 business day of receiving them.
- Drop-shipping to the end consumer: Sellers on Back Market must drop ship devices directly to the verified customer address and upload tracking numbers into the platform.
Steps to Start Selling:
- Create a seller account from this link.
- Contact a Back Market representative and complete basic administrative details (email newbiz@backmarket.com ).
- Connect your SellerActive account to sync inventory across to Back Market (instructions will be provided upon onboarding).
- Complete a 1-month trial period.
- Fully unlimited sales begin after 1 month.