Newegg is getting further into refurbished tech with its Newegg Refreshed program, which offers products refurbished by the retailer itself and acts as a trade-in mechanism for PC components. Many popular products, like graphics cards, PCs, and Apple devices will be offered and traded through Newegg Refreshed. The program is ostensibly to offer customers better and more environmentally-friendly deals, but it also appears to be a step towards righting the company's fuzzy record on used products.
Newegg already sells refurbished hardware on its website, but this hardware is sold by third parties not necessarily affiliated with Newegg. Newegg Refreshed advertises itself as more reliable and guarantees that "all essential accessories" get included. There's also a 90-day window to return a Newegg Refreshed product for either a refund or a replacement.
In many ways, Newegg Refreshed builds on top of the graphics card trade-in program the company launched a few months ago, which is now a part of Newegg Refresh. You can already find products on Newegg with the Newegg Refreshed sticker attached, though stock seems to be very mixed. There's plenty of Apple devices to buy right now, but only a handful of AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Other internal PC components aren't even part of Newegg Refreshed, which even has robot vacuums instead of other key computer parts like CPUs.
One feature that doesn't seem to be active at the moment is trade-in for other PC components. Newegg's press release doesn't really go into detail on what it will and won't accept for trade-in, stating only that Newegg Refreshed "enables customers to trade in unwanted PC hardware."
While Newegg's publicly stated motivations to get more involved with refurbished products are to give its customers better deals and go green, it's also quite possible that this is an attempt to reform the company's business around used hardware. Newegg landed itself in very hot water back in 2022 when it refused to give Gamers Nexus a refund for a used motherboard on the grounds that it was damaged. The problem was that Gamers Nexus hadn't even opened it yet, and it became clear that the board was a refurbished unit that Newegg neglected to actually fix.
The saga culminated in Newegg changing some of its policies surrounding returns for used CPUs and motherboards. That Newegg's refurbishment program offers 90 days for refunds and replacements is a significant change considering the company hasn't even always offered refunds for brand-new hardware.
