New, open box, refurbished, returns-graded: what the condition grades actually mean

1. There is no standard. None. Here is the proof

Who governs liquidation grades

Nobody

Who governs marketplace conditions

Amazon and eBay, with published definitions

Whose claim is legally actionable

Yours, to your customer

Say it plainly, because the trade rarely does: liquidation condition grades have no standard, no regulator and no cross-seller meaning. The industry admits it in writing. B-Stock tells buyers that some sellers may categorise their inventory differently and to review the seller's conditions page before bidding.22 Pallet resellers write that one supplier's Grade A can look like another supplier's Grade B, and that grading is not standardised.

Here are four published scales from four real sellers. Read them side by side.

Now the comparison that should end the argument:

And here is why that matters more to you than to the seller. Amazon and eBay both have published, enforceable, in eBay's case warranty-backed definitions. The supply chain feeding them has none. Mapping a liquidation Grade C onto an Amazon “Used — Acceptable” listing is the precise point at which sellers get suspended, because Amazon's used tiers all require the item to work perfectly and liquidation grades degrade function as well as appearance.

The working rule: never repeat a supplier's grade to a customer. Inspect, grade it yourself against the platform's published definition, and describe what you actually have.

2. What Ontario law lets you call it

The statute

Consumer Protection Act, 2002

The mechanism

Unfair practice — false, misleading or deceptive representation

The remedy

Consumer may withdraw from the agreement; courts may award punitive damages

Ontario's Consumer Protection Act, 2002 treats a false, misleading or deceptive representation as an unfair practice, and enumerates specific representations that qualify.6 Three of them land directly on graded stock:

• That the goods are new, or unused, if they are not or are reconditioned or reclaimed
• That the goods have been used to an extent that is materially different from the fact
• That the goods are of a particular standard, quality, grade, style or model, if they are not

Read the third one again, slowly. Grade. Your own published grade definition becomes legally binding on you the moment you publish it. If your listing says Grade A and your Grade A page describes light cosmetic wear only, and you ship a unit with a cracked bezel, that is an unfair practice in Ontario — regardless of what your supplier called the pallet. Your supplier's dialect is not a defence.

Ontario's own business guide uses the fact pattern almost verbatim as its example of an unfair practice: a store selling electronics that they advertised as new when they have been refurbished.7 The same guide notes that a consumer may withdraw from an agreement entered into as a result of an unfair practice, that courts may award damages including punitive damages, and that a business must provide a satisfactory response — which may include a refund — within 30 calendar days.7

3. Quebec is stricter, and something big is about to change

The statute

Consumer Protection Act, CQLR c P-40.1

What is new

A statutory guarantee of good working order, in force 5 October 2026

Why resellers must care

It follows the product through changes of ownership

If you ship anywhere in Canada, Quebec sets your ceiling, because Quebec's consumer regime is the strongest in the country and it addresses used goods directly.

The prohibitions

Section 219 states that no merchant, manufacturer or advertiser may, by any means whatever, make false or misleading representations to a consumer.9 Section 221 goes further than any other Canadian statute on this subject: it prohibits falsely representing that a good is new, refurbished, or used to a given extent — and separately that a good has a particular history or a particular prior use.

That is the only place in Canadian law we are aware of where "refurbished" is named expressly. Ontario reaches the same result through "reconditioned or reclaimed"; Quebec says the word.

The legal warranty, and why it is price-sensitive

Quebec's legal warranty runs beneath every consumer sale, and cannot be disclaimed.9 Goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are ordinarily used. They must serve for normal use for a reasonable time, having regard to their price, the terms of the contract and the conditions of use. Replacement parts and repair services must remain available for a reasonable time. And the consumer may proceed directly against the merchant or the manufacturer, at their choice.10

The price-sensitivity is the useful part for a reseller. Because durability is measured against what the customer paid, a deeply discounted open-box unit carries a proportionately lower durability expectation than a full-price one. But it does not carry zero. You cannot price your way out of the warranty; you can only move where the bar sits.

The change landing on 5 October 2026

Quebec's new garantie de bon fonctionnement — guarantee of good working order — comes into force on 5 October 2026, creating a statutory minimum working-order period with fixed durations and no requirement for the consumer to prove a defect.1112

Three provisions matter enormously to anyone reselling graded stock into Quebec:

1. It applies to goods sold as new — but it follows used goods too. A used or refurbished item is covered if it was originally sold or leased as new on or after 5 October 2026 and the guarantee period is still running, calculated from the original delivery date, not from your resale.
2. The duration must be displayed next to the advertised price. Clearly and in proximity to the price — in store, online, on labels, in advertising and in flyers.
3. The consumer chooses who to pursue. Merchant or manufacturer. A manufacturer cannot redirect the consumer to the retailer, and a retailer cannot redirect them to the manufacturer.

Work the timeline forward. From late 2029, a reseller flipping a used Quebec-sold phone back into Quebec will routinely be handling goods that still carry a residual statutory working-order guarantee they must disclose beside the price — and a repair obligation somebody has to fund. That is a business-model question, not a compliance footnote, and it is worth deciding now whether Quebec is a market you serve.

Quebec's penalties were also raised sharply in January 2025: administrative monetary penalties up to $1,750 for individuals and $3,500 for corporations, imposed daily for continuing non-compliance, and penal fines up to $87,500 for individuals or up to 5 per cent of worldwide turnover for corporations.

4. The performance claim rule nobody knows about

This is the sharpest and least-known provision in Canadian marketing law, and it applies to almost every refurbished electronics listing written.

Section 74.01(1)(b) of the Competition Act makes it reviewable conduct to make a representation to the public, in the form of a statement, warranty or guarantee, of the performance, efficacy or length of life of a product that is not based on an adequate and proper test of it.2

The burden sits on you, and it sits before the claim. You do not get to be right by accident. The Bureau's guidance is explicit that the test must have been performed before the representation was made.4

• “Battery health 85% or better” across a lot you did not individually test — a length-of-life claim with no adequate and proper test
• “Lasts all day” on a refurbished phone — same problem
• “95% working” on a pallet you have not tested — same problem
• “Like-new battery life” — same problem, softer wording, same provision

There is a companion provision: section 74.01(1)(c) catches a warranty or guarantee that is materially misleading, or where there is no reasonable prospect it will be carried out.2 A one-person reseller advertising a one-year warranty on liquidation electronics, with no repair capability, no parts supply and no reserve set aside, is exposed on that provision whether or not any unit ever fails.

And the ordinary price rule, which catches the manifest

An "ordinary price" claim — "Reg. $299, our price $89" — is valid only if it passes one of two tests: a volume test, where more than half the sales of that product over a reasonable period were at that price or higher, or a time test, where the product was offered in good faith at that price or higher for a substantial period of that time.5

The MSRP column on a liquidation manifest is not your ordinary selling price. You have never sold at it and never offered at it. Advertising against it fails both tests, and it is the single most common compliance failure in pallet resale — partly because the manifest hands you the number and it feels like data.

Penalties, for scale: on the civil track, up to the greater of $750,000 or three times the benefit derived for an individual, and the greater of $10 million, three times the benefit, or 3 per cent of annual worldwide gross revenues for a corporation — rising to $1 million and $15 million on a subsequent occurrence, with restitution to purchasers available. On the criminal track, up to $200,000 and a year on summary conviction, or a fine at the court's discretion and up to 14 years on indictment.3

5. Amazon: a cosmetic ladder with a functional floor

Amazon publishes condition definitions and enforces them.14 Paraphrasing its ladder:

The structural point, which is where sellers come unstuck: every used tier below Like New still requires the item to work perfectly. Amazon's ladder degrades appearance only. It has a hard functional floor.

Liquidation grades do not work that way — they degrade function alongside cosmetics. So there is no honest mapping from a liquidation Grade C to "Used — Acceptable," because Grade C contemplates missing parts and units that may not work, and Amazon's Acceptable does not. Anything that does not work perfectly belongs in "For parts" on a platform that offers it, or nowhere.

Amazon Renewed

Renewed is available on Amazon.ca, and the entry gate is high: Amazon requires invoices showing a minimum total value of $50,000 in qualifying refurbished purchases in the previous 90 days — $2.5 million for Apple-branded items, or 180 days for Home, Tools, Kitchen and Lawn & Garden.15 Products must be inspected, repaired, cleaned, tested and repackaged to meet original manufacturer specifications.

Two published standards from the Renewed programme are worth borrowing even if you never join it:

Battery

Where present, capacity must exceed 80% of the new equivalent

Cosmetics

No signs of cosmetic damage visible when the product is held 30 centimetres away

Packaging

Original packaging or a new cardboard box — nothing ships in an envelope or padded mailer

That 30-centimetre test is the most useful grading tool in this entire article, because it is objective, repeatable and takes two seconds. Adopt it.

6. eBay: the only platform that ties warranty to grade

eBay publishes numeric condition IDs, which makes its vocabulary the most precise of the three.1617

The retirement of "Seller refurbished" is the change that catches Canadian sellers. eBay Canada states the consequence plainly: if you are not eligible to list as Certified Refurbished, you will need to list your items as Used.18 You cannot self-declare refurbished any more.

eBay Refurbished is live in Canada, and eligibility is a real bar: Top Rated Seller status, at least 98 per cent positive feedback, Item Not As Described under 4 per cent, Item Not Received under 1 per cent, and a minimum 30-day return window with free returns.18

What makes eBay's ladder legally different from everyone else's: the warranty is underwritten, not seller-promised. Certified carries two years and the other refurbished tiers carry one, covering 100 per cent of parts and labour with no deductible.19 Exclusions include accidental damage, normal wear, cosmetic damage, commercial-use purchases and items without valid proof of purchase.

Which means "Excellent — Refurbished" is a phrase with a defined term attached. "Grade A" is not.

7. Best Buy Canada, and where the three ladders converge

Best Buy Canada publishes a three-step refurbished ladder with a battery standard:20

Excellent

Looks very close to new, a few light signs of wear in non-visible areas. One-year warranty

Good

Small, light signs of wear that do not affect how the device works. Minimum three-month warranty

Fair

Visible signs of wear anywhere on the body. Minimum three-month warranty

Every unit is inspected by a refurbishing partner, tested, ships with a compatible charger, and carries a battery at 80 per cent of its original capacity or better.20 Open-box products carry a one-year warranty, and Geek Squad Certified open box items are rigorously inspected, tested and cleaned.21

The convergence, and why it is your benchmark

Three independent commercial operators, working separately, arrived at substantially the same definition of “excellent”: no cosmetic damage visible at normal viewing distance, at least 80 per cent battery capacity, and a one-year warranty.

That convergence is the benchmark you should measure a liquidation grade against — and it is the measure by which most liquidation grades fail. When a pallet seller's Grade A carries no battery standard, no viewing-distance test and no warranty, it is not describing the same thing the market means by "excellent," whatever letter it uses.

8. Manifested, unmanifested, and the MSRP column trap

A manifest is an item-level list you can price against: description, quantity per line, unit retail, condition grade, often UPC and brand. An unmanifested lot is bought blind on a category description and photographs.

Unmanifested is not automatically a bad buy — it is priced lower precisely because the information is missing, and an experienced buyer in a category they know can make that work. It is a terrible first purchase, because you have no way to tell whether the price was fair until it is too late to matter.

The manifest carries its own trap, and it is the one from section 4. The retail column is sticker price, not resale value, and using it as a "regular price" in your own advertising fails both Competition Act ordinary-price tests.5 Price against what comparable units are actually selling for on the platform you list on, today.

9. Where the pallet came from, and returnless refunds

Scale first. The National Retail Federation put total US returns at $849.9 billion in 2025 — 15.8 per cent of annual retail sales and 19.3 per cent of online sales, with 9 per cent of all returns assessed as fraudulent.25 No equivalent Canadian figure is published that we could find, which is worth saying rather than quietly substituting the US number.

The inventory types behind a pallet are genuinely different products and should be priced differently:

Overstock

Never sold, never handled by a customer. The best outcome, and priced accordingly

Shelf pulls

Exposed for sale in store but unsold. Box wear and handling marks, function intact

Customer returns

Condition varies enormously. This is where grading actually matters

Warehouse damaged

Damaged or imperfect but never left the warehouse — often cosmetic only

Salvage

Heavy damage, missing parts, failed function. Parts value

Returnless refunds change what is in the box

Major retailers now routinely issue refunds without requiring the item back, because processing the return costs more than the item's recoverable value. The consequence for buyers of graded stock is counterintuitive and worth understanding.

Returnless refunds systematically remove the lowest-value, highest-defect units from the returns stream before it ever reaches liquidation. So a returns pallet skews higher in value than the raw return population — which is good. But it also means that vendor-published "75 per cent working" rules of thumb are derived from an already-filtered stream, and do not transfer across categories or retailers.

Where returnless inventory physically ends up is not documented in any source we could find, and by definition much of it never enters reverse logistics at all. Anyone who tells you confidently is speculating.

10. Electronics: batteries, data, and certification marks

The 80 per cent battery floor

Amazon Renewed requires above 80 per cent of the new-equivalent capacity. Best Buy Canada requires 80 per cent or better.1520 Two independent operators at the same number is, in practice, the market standard — and it is the number a customer will measure you against whether or not you published it.

But remember section 4. Battery capacity is a length-of-life claim, and under the Competition Act it must rest on an adequate and proper test performed before you make it.24 Test each unit, record the reading against the serial number, and keep the record. That file is both your grading process and your legal defence, and it takes about forty seconds per device.

Data wiping — and the Canadian case that should scare you

In December 2025 Canada's Privacy Commissioner published findings on a national retailer's open-box programme. Investigators sampled returned laptops from four Ontario stores. Roughly 23 per cent still contained residual personal information from previous users — full names, email addresses, Windows usernames, email fragments, partial facial images and document titles.26

The OPC found breaches of PIPEDA's security safeguards principles: the retailer lacked clear procedures and standards for wiping devices consistent with manufacturer guidance, its internal policies contradicted one another, and some technicians were self-taught with no formal training.26 The agreed remedies included documented manufacturer-compliant procedures, mandatory training before any technician wipes a device, and annual independent third-party audits for three years.

If a national retailer with a dedicated refurbishment operation failed on close to a quarter of sampled units, a reseller working through a pallet in a garage will do worse. Write the procedure down, follow the manufacturer's own wipe guidance for each device class, and log every unit. It is a modest amount of work and the alternative is a privacy complaint with your name on it.

Certification marks, honestly

This is the part where most articles overclaim, so here is the careful version.

ISED's RSP-100 states that certificate holders and all associated responsible parties — manufacturers, importers, distributors and vendors — have a regulatory obligation to ensure the product continues to meet all applicable standards throughout its entire life cycle, and modifications are governed by a permissive-change framework.27 It does not say that repair or refurbishment invalidates a certification, and we are not going to pretend it does.

On the electrical side, Ontario requires approval before a product is used, sold, displayed or even advertised for sale, and the Electrical Safety Authority recognises around forty certification bodies.28 ESA publishes no specific guidance on refurbished goods.

So the defensible rule is this: the unit you sell must still bear a recognised Canadian certification mark, and a repair that changes how a device transmits is a regulatory question and not merely a technical one. If a refurbishment strips, obscures or replaces the label carrying the certification mark, you have a problem you can see. The rest is a question for the certification body. The broader Canadian certification picture is in our compliance guide.

11. Who actually carries the warranty

Manufacturer warranties are not built to survive the secondary market, and the drafting shows it.

Apple's Canadian limited warranty, as a representative example, runs one year from original retail purchase to the end-user purchaser, and excludes damage caused by service performed by anyone who is not Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider.29 It also notes that the warranty gives specific legal rights and that other rights vary by province, and that residents of Quebec are governed by that province's consumer protection legislation.

Read that against a third-party refurbishment and the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: on a third-party refurbished device, the reseller is the warrantor, not the manufacturer.

And back to section 4 one last time, because it closes the loop: under section 74.01(1)(c) a warranty that is materially misleading, or that there is no reasonable prospect will be carried out, is itself reviewable conduct.2 If you advertise a warranty, be able to honour it. That means parts, a repair path, and money set aside — or a shorter warranty you can actually deliver.

The checklist

Common questions

Sources

Every figure and rule above comes from one of these. Where this article draws a conclusion the source does not state literally, it says so in the text.

1. Competition Act, section 52 (criminal false or misleading representations)
2. Competition Act, section 74.01 (reviewable representations, including performance claims)
3. Competition Bureau — false or misleading representations and deceptive marketing practices
4. Competition Bureau — performance claims not based on an adequate and proper test
5. Competition Bureau — ordinary selling price
6. Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (Ontario)
7. Ontario — business guide to consumer protection: key concepts
8. Consumer Protection Act, 2023 (Ontario), SO 2023 c 23 Sch 1 — check the in-force date
9. Consumer Protection Act (Quebec), CQLR c P-40.1
10. Office de la protection du consommateur — warranties before purchasing goods
11. Office de la protection du consommateur — the new guarantee of good working order (merchant guidance)
12. Office de la protection du consommateur — press release on the new working-order guarantee
13. An Act to protect consumers from planned obsolescence, SQ 2023 c 21
14. Amazon — marketplace items condition guidelines
15. Amazon — sell Renewed products (Canada)
16. eBay — item condition by category
17. eBay developer documentation — condition ID and name values
18. eBay Canada — eBay Refurbished programme
19. eBay Canada — eBay Refurbished warranty terms
20. Best Buy Canada — buying refurbished products (grades and battery standard)
21. Best Buy Canada — Geek Squad Certified Open Box products
22. B-Stock — inventory types and conditions
23. Direct Liquidation — merchandise conditions
24. Via Trading — product conditions
25. National Retail Federation — 2025 retail returns landscape
26. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — PIPEDA Findings #2025-004 (Staples Canada open-box laptops)
27. ISED — RSP-100: certification of radio apparatus (life-cycle obligations of responsible parties)
28. Electrical Safety Authority (Ontario) — product safety regulation
29. Apple — one-year limited warranty, Canada

Last reviewed September 25, 2026. Rules and rates change. If you find something here that has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.