Refurbished products to overcome the digital divide, the Back Market study

The pandemic has highlighted the need to use digital devices in everyday life to work and study, but these are very often expensive. The solution exists and lies in refurbished products, as evidenced by the data collected by Back Market in Italy

Exponential growth for purchases made by Italians from the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency to today on Back Market, the first marketplace that offers access to thousands of technological products refurbished by certified professionals. The lion’s share are laptops (+ 575%) and MacBooks (+ 323%), followed by smartphones (+ 85%) and tablets (+ 62%). The increase in sales of video game consoles is less (+ 29%), demonstrating how the repeated periods of lockdown mainly push the purchase of devices necessary for distance learning and smart working. Simone Marchiori, Marketing Manager of Back Market Italia, declares:

It is clear that refurbished products are offering many Italians forced to purchase electronic devices an optimal solution to combine budget needs and quality research. In this sense, refurbished products help to mitigate the digital divide caused by the lack of devices between different groups of citizens and strongly accentuated by the pandemic.

The impact of Covid-19 on the digital divide is revealed by Istat’s 2020 Annual Report, according to which 45.4 percent of students aged 6-17 (3.1 million children) are very likely to experience difficulties in distance learning precisely because of the lack of computer tools in the family, or because they are completely absent or because of the need to share them with brothers and sisters. The role of refurbished electronics in bridging this growing gap is evidenced not only by the increase in sales, but also by the results of a survey: 53% of the Back Market customers interviewed, in fact, stated that if he had to buy a new device he would have given up the purchase due to budget constraints.

Refurbished products: low cost and high yield

Back Market, on the other hand, offers consumers the undoubted advantage of being able to access thousands of refurbished technological products to buy with a saving between 30 and 70% on the cost of the new one, but achieving the same quality. Back Market allows access to its platform only to professionals specialized in reconditioning, systematically checking the procedures and making sure that they are daily aligned with scrupulous quality parameters: each product is verified and is guaranteed from 12 up to 24 months. Not only. Such products help the environment: lasting longer and reducing the volume of waste, have an ecological impact of 80% less than new products. For example, around 144,000 tons of CO2 were saved by purchasing smartphones on the Back Market equivalents and the exploitation of approximately 160,000 tons of primary natural resources has been prevented. Taken together, moreover, the purchases made on the Back Market – extending the life of devices and appliances – have avoided approximately 1,609 tons of electronic waste.

Buying refurbished products through platforms such as Back Market therefore has the same guarantees as buying a new one, with the advantage of a more advantageous price and a smaller environmental footprint. From the web and social section, that’s all! Keep following us!