The scratched coffee machine that broke your price comparison
Every e-shop of a certain size sells things that are not new. That is ordinary retail, and it costs nobody anything until somebody else's software reads the product page and cannot tell the difference.
Worked example
The shops and figures below are invented. The sequence is one we have watched play out more than once.
An appliance retailer tracks five competitors on a mid-range coffee machine. Recommended retail is 24,990 Kč. They sell it at 23,390 Kč and the rule in their repricing tool is one line long: never sit more than 1% above the cheapest of the five.
Six days inside one repricing rule
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Mon 06:10 | The overnight price collection lands. One of the five competitors shows 18,990 Kč. |
| Mon 06:11 | The rule does exactly what it was built to do. The price goes to 18,800 Kč. Margin per unit falls from about 3,300 Kč to roughly 60. |
| Tue 14:20 | The 18,990 Kč machine sells. It was a single piece from the other shop's “damaged packaging” section: scratched casing, full warranty, one in stock. Their price for a boxed one never moved from 23,990 Kč. |
| Tue evening | Two smaller shops that use this retailer as their own reference point drop to 19,740. |
| Thu | The brand's sales rep calls to ask why his machine is 25% below recommended retail on three different sites. |
| Mon (+7) | Somebody finally looks. The price goes back to 22,690 Kč, not quite where it started. Comparison sites keep price history. The retailer's own chart now shows a 21% increase. And the 41 customers who bought at 18,800 Kč have told their friends. |
Nobody in that story behaved badly. The competitor was clearing a damaged box, and the rule matched the cheapest number it could see. About 133,000 Kč of margin is gone over one missing fact. A shopper would have read it off the page in half a second.
One damaged unit, six days of wrong prices
The market never moved. Both blue lines are the same competitor. The solid one is what they charged for a normal boxed machine, unchanged for the whole fortnight. The dashed one is the other thing they had on the shelf that week, and the length of it is the point. It existed for two days. The prices it moved lasted six.
There is no yellow sticker
In a physical shop this cannot happen. Reduced goods have their own shelf, usually near the door, in a scuffed box, with a yellow sticker on the front. The separation is physical, and nobody needs to have it explained. No buyer in the history of retail has set the price of chicken by looking at the reduced-to-clear cabinet.
Online, the damaged machine sits on the same shelf as everything else. Same template, same photo frame, same price format. Whatever marks it as damaged is a word or two somewhere in the text. Where exactly depends on whoever built the shop.
Non-new goods are not one business but several, and they arrived in the catalogue at different times for different reasons.
- Returns from the statutory withdrawal window. Opened, complete, usually sold as “open box”.
- Damage in transit or in the warehouse. Cosmetic, full warranty, sold as “damaged packaging”.
- Trade-ins and buy-backs, which need their own channel and usually their own grading.
- Ex-display and demo pieces from showrooms and trade fairs.
- Units repaired by an authorised service and sold as refurbished.
- Second-quality stock that the manufacturer itself downgraded, which arrives as new goods with a flaw rather than as used goods.
- Rentals, where nothing is being sold at all and the number on the page is a daily rate.
Each arrived by its own route. One got a proper category because somebody sat down and built one. The next got a suffix in the product name, because on the day that was quicker. Nobody designed it in one go. It accumulated over years, one decision at a time, and that is exactly what the catalogue looks like today.
Spot the condition
The same scratched machine, as six different shops would put it on the page. Four of them tell you, if you know where to look. One says nothing at all. One of them lies.
The same scratched machine at six shops
| What you see | What you need to know to read it |
|---|---|
| shop.cz/open-box/coffee-machine-x | Nothing. The shop has already done the sorting, and the category name says what it means. |
| “Open Box - Coffee Machine X” | That the prefix is a condition and not a product line. Categories outlive product names. Marketing rewrites them. |
| A pill reading Grade B, beside three more saying Free delivery, Gift and Competition | Which of the four pills is the one about condition, and what B means in this particular shop. |
| A spec row: Condition · shop-soiled | That shop-soiled is British retail for wear picked up on the shop floor. |
| Nothing on the page. In the source, “itemCondition”: “New” | That the field is wrong. Plenty of shops stamp “new” on the whole catalogue once and never revisit it. |
| A photograph of a dented box | How to read a photograph. |
Same fact, six filing systems. A shop that uses two or three of these at once is completely normal, and when two of them disagree there is no rule about which one wins.
Grades look like the responsible option and are quietly the worst of the six, because the scale is always local. Grade A on a phone reseller is a device with barely visible wear. On a DIY chain, factory seconds has nothing to do with wear. The manufacturer downgraded a brand-new item over a cosmetic flaw. B-Stock at a German instrument retailer covers a returned cable and a demo grand piano with equal confidence.
Hotel stars work the same way: everyone uses them, nobody agrees on the scale, and a four-star in one country is a comfortable three in another. It matters less there, because a person booking a hotel reads the reviews too. Software comparing two prices has only the label.
The words fight back
The best cases are nobody's mistake. They are words that look unambiguous and are not. Only someone who speaks the language would spot it.
Labels that look unambiguous
| Label | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|
| used vs used look | A guitar finished to look worn is a brand-new guitar. Every relic finish in the catalogue carries the word. |
| new inside renewed | “Renewed” is a standard label for a refurbished device. So are “as new” and “nearly new”. All three contain the word they are the opposite of. |
| open box vs open the box | One is the condition. The other is the first line of the setup instructions, on a product that is still sealed. |
| New (Other) | A real marketplace condition, meaning new but not in its original packaging. Starts with the word “new” and is not quite it. |
| shop-soiled | Ordinary British retail for display wear, and a phrase no vocabulary built anywhere else would ever contain. |
| DEMO on a tyre vs Demo in a music shop | At a tyre retailer, DEMO is an ex-display tyre with worn tread, so used goods. In a music shop it is a demo instrument, but just as often a demo version of software or a model with Demo in its name. One word, two shops, two meanings. |
Six real retail labels. A shopper reads them correctly at a glance. A program that only searches the text for words does not.
How much of this is out there
How much non-new stock actually sits in e-shop catalogues? We looked at 174 shops we monitor.
Non-new products in every 10,000, at shops that sell them
A median, not an average, because otherwise a single clearance specialist decides the whole row. Most shops have no non-new channel at all, so a category's figure describes the ones that do, not the average competitor. And these are floors rather than totals: they count only what a shop marks clearly enough to be read from outside. The true figure is this much or more.
It depends on the category, and not in the direction most people would guess. A fashion e-shop sits at a clean zero. Video games and musical instruments run to roughly 450 non-new items in every 10,000, about one product in twenty-two. The ones to watch are the ordinary retailers in the middle. A clearance section nobody talks about quietly holds a couple of hundred in every 10,000 there. Small enough to miss on a dashboard. Large enough to set a price.
What to take away
One damaged unit can set the price at three e-shops. All it takes is a rule that cannot tell it apart from a new one.
Spotting it from outside is not a given. Every e-shop marks condition differently: a category, a prefix in the name, a badge, a grade, or nothing at all. And words like renewed or nearly new work against anyone who only searches the text for terms.
There is more of it than people think. Around one product in twenty-two at video game and instrument shops, one in forty in consumer electronics.
So ask one question: how many of the competitor prices in your comparison belong to non-new goods. Not whether the system handles it. Whether somebody can show you the number. A used product read as new passes quietly. It looks like a real price, sits below the market, and gets acted on at six in the morning.
None of the shops in this article did anything wrong. “Open Box” in a product name is sensible when you are the one writing product names. It only turns expensive when somebody else's rule reads that name and takes it literally.
Methodology. The sample behind the chart is 174 e-shops we monitor and 5.4 million live products. We count one shop per retail brand and leave out classifieds and price-comparison sites. Of the 174 shops, 67 have non-new stock we can see. Per category that is 3 to 23 shops, and the bar is the median of those. A category appears when we monitor at least two shops and 25,000 live products in it and at least three of those shops have non-new stock. No median rests on one or two shops. Fashion is the exception. We kept it in the chart at zero to show that a genuine zero exists. Three further categories where we also see none are not charted. The coffee machine, its prices and the shops in the worked example are invented, and the sequence is composited from real incidents rather than taken from one of them.
This article is built on DeepScout data. If the topic is relevant to you, get in touch - we are happy to talk it through.