Have you ever been tempted to buy a refurbished item, but not quite sure what you’ll get or where you’ll stand if there is something wrong with it? In this video I try out the Ninja outlet store on eBay and it doesn’t go according to plan…
Transcript
Who doesn’t wish that sometimes stuff was just a bit cheaper? Especially when it comes to premium appliances and especially when you run a youtube channel where you buy most of the things you review….
This is the story of the refurbished soup maker I bought from Ninja and how things didn’t exactly go to plan…
So SharkNinja has an outlet store on eBay. It’s selling products direct with no third party involved and over the last nearly 8 years they’ve sold a quite mind-blowing 122 thousand items that’s over a 1000 items a month. And you can buy pretty much anything from their range refurbished at up to 50% off
The items they sell are generally things that have been sent back to Ninja within their 30 day returns window. Ninja check them over, repackage them often in a plain box and then sell them again with a 1 year-warranty. Sometimes they have small cosmetics imperfections but it will tell you that on the listing
The feedback on the Ninja ebay store is pretty good, 98.5% positive, but we’re talking high sales numbers here and that still means 1.5% of people who bought from them or 250 customers in the last 12 months have given them negative feedback AND if you dig a little deeper there’s nearly as many neutral feedback comments as negative
BUT you’ve got the ebay money back guarantee, the Ninja 1 year guarantee and potentailly paypal protection and credit card cover, so in theory not a lot can go wrong…right?
I decided to give it a go and I purchased a Ninja soup maker and blender which was for sale for £99.99, £50 cheaper than on Amazon. It arrived 24 hours later in a plain brown box and at first everything looked pretty good.
I had instructions, the item was clean and all the parts were there, no obvious wear or damage….and then I started using it
I was about 3 days in when I realised that everything wasn’t quite right. The lid on the soup maker is secured to the jug in two places. At the front where you slide it in to a locking position, but also at the back where the lid should fit under a glass lip on the jug, except that mine didn’t
The more I used it the more the problem became obvious, particularly when heat or bubbling of liquid would force the rubber sealed lid upwards because there was nothing holding it at the back. I particularly noticed it on the washing cycle when the jug was full up to the max line and I thought it might pop off entirely!
I thought it was me. I thought I was putting it on the jug wrong, But when I looked closer at it there was an obvious line between the top and bottom of the lid where the two were out of alignment, so I tried pushing them together, they came closer together but almost immediately popped apart again and whatever I did, I couldn’t get the lid to tuck under the glass lip of the jug
So at this point I’m thinking my bargain is a bit of an epic fail. Particularly because it came from ebay and I thought that was going to be an extra level of complication. So I decided to just try Ninja customer service direct. I emailed through the website and sent them some photos. It was a Saturday and so I didn’t expect to hear back till Monday, but within about an hour they had replied, but they asked me to call them and I’m thinking now I have to try an explain this on the phone without pictures….
On a Saturday Ninja’s helplines are open 9am – 7pm, so I decided to leave it till the later in the afternoon when I had more time. I called up, went through the usual options on the phone and got through to a real person in under 5 minutes and you know what they have this really cool way of solving the problem of trying to explain what’s wrong, they text you a link and then that allows you to stream the camera of my phone direct to the help desk so you can show them the problem live. I’ve never had this before and it’s amazing technology
The customer service guy immediately got the problem, he didn’t make me show proof of purchase or how long ago I bought it he just told me straight away that he’d arrange a replacment and he even registered my guarantee whilst I was on the phone
It turns out the jug and the lid are actually one spare part together so he had to dispatch both as one. The right price for these is £60. I had tracking information within hours and the parcel turned up a couple of days later.
Do I think I was stitched up with a dodgy product? No, but I think Ninja were probably stitched up by the person who returned it. I suspect the lid was dropped which is how it ended up misaligned like that and wouldn’t pop back. So Ninja are supposed to check them over, but this one slipped through somehow. Maybe they don’t have a lot of time, maybe they are literally checking the power works. I think it was probably quite easy to miss, but I am impressed with the speed that they dealt with the replacement part and the fact they took my word for when I bought it and didn’t make me jump through hoops
In theory you have a shorter guarantee by buying refurbished, BUT the two year guarantee that Ninja offer on new items is only active IF you register your item within 28 days of buying it so I am guessing that a lot of people end up with only a year guarantee even on new
I would say refurbished is definitely a good option if you were considering second hand anyway, but if you want to buy new and can wait it might be worth keeping your eye out for deals. The cheapest price that the Ninja soup maker has sold on Amazon NEW is actually £2 cheaper than the refurbished price.