Who can cure the recycling chaos of second-hand mobile phones?
The water of second-hand mobile phones is very deep, and there are tens of thousands of related complaints on the black cat alone, either the battery has been replaced, or the camera has been replaced, why is the chaos frequent? "For a non-standard industry, how can we cure the chronic disease of the industry?
"Second-hand mobile phones, in essence, are paid for knowledge. ”
In less than a month, second-hand e-commerce companies and Apple's official recycler Aifengpai were exposed one after another. The former was questioned by Internet celebrity bloggers for issuing a "yin and yang detection" report, and there were differences in the test results between the purchase and recycling of the same mobile phone in its offline store; Recently, "City Boundary" visited a number of offline second-hand mobile phone recycling points and chatted with several people in the industry. Everyone unanimously mentioned the "knowledge payment", "information gap", and the resulting price difference.
A mobile phone recycler who has been in the business for 8 years told "City Boundary": "In this industry, it is better to look at machines than people", because "as long as you have been in the business for two years, you will definitely be able to cheat if you want to". Another practitioner who entered the second-hand mobile phone industry two years ago said that in addition to selling problem machines and refurbished machines, "buying low and selling high" is a common phenomenon in the industry.
However, this business model of making the difference in price has recently been questioned as several recycling head companies have been mired in controversy, and many users on social media have criticized it, making industry players begin to reflect on how to solve the many problems caused by non-standardization in the industry.
The second-hand recycling industry has never lacked "money", before the second-hand mobile phone, second-hand housing, second-hand cars have already formed a huge industry. The second-hand mobile phone industry, which has existed for many years, has also increased its transaction scale year by year, and after entering the Internet era, it has given birth to a number of giants such as Xianyu, Zhuan Zhuan, and Aihuihui, and has also fed many players including Aifengpai, Le Recycling, Ai Change, Yiji.com, Suning Recycling, etc.
But at present, in the face of market controversy and consumer doubts, the question that these industry players need to answer is what they have brought to the industry in addition to sharing the cake and making the difference, and how will they solve the stubborn problem of opacity and non-standardization in the entire industry?
01. Second-hand mobile phones, chaos is frequent
In December 2020, because of work needs, Chang Wei pondered buying a spare mobile phone. brushed a bunch of strategies, and finally chose an individual seller with "good sesame credit" on Xianyu, and spent 1550 yuan to get a Redmi K20 Pro Extreme Edition.
"It's more reliable to buy a second-hand mobile phone for personal use. This is a sentence that many people will see when they check the strategy, and Chang Wei is the same. More reliable than this, there is only one channel left - the old mobile phone that is not used by relatives and friends. But what Chang Wei didn't expect was that he still overturned.
"I don't usually see a big problem, but I will restart with an intermittent black screen. In order to recover his losses as much as possible, Chang Wei hung up the mobile phone on Xianyu and finally sold it at a price of 1,300 yuan. Between buying and selling, it is still the same problematic machine, but there is a new "victim".
In the C2C model of person-to-person, the lack of trust and endorsement of second-hand mobile phone transactions has given industry players the opportunity to rise. Compared with individual sellers, B-end companies with stronger funds and larger brands can bring more trust to users, and they can find a platform if something happens, or they can go directly to the store for after-sales. However, while their entry into the market has allowed the industry to evolve in the direction of standardization, new problems have also been born.
Two major incidents have recently erupted in the industry, one is the "Yin and Yang Test Report" of the turn, a blogger exposed that the quality inspection report sold in the same mobile phone sales and recycling links is different, and it is believed that there is a "deliberate price reduction" behavior of recycling; Earlier, companies such as Aihuishou were also involved in the controversy of "recycling and lowering prices".
If you put all the problems together, the data is staggering: on the Black Cat complaint alone, there are close to 10,000 complaints related to "second-hand mobile phones", and as many as 17,000 complaints related to "mobile phone recycling".
"Many of the so-called models simply don't apply in the second-hand mobile phone industry. Li Huaqiang has been dealing with second-hand mobile phones for nearly 8 years, and he told "City Boundary" that as a non-standard product, mobile phones are "one machine, one condition, one price", and there is no such thing as "Ding is Ding Mao is Mao". This also means that users who "don't know how to do it" are destined to be the weak side.
"The vast majority of users don't understand mobile phones, at most they know which one is good for taking pictures and which one is fast for charging, but these are just appearances. Li Huaqiang said frankly that the second-hand mobile phone industry is similar to old Chinese medicine, not just by watching tutorials and evaluations. What's more, the so-called assessments that can be found on the market have different arguments.
Moreover, second-hand recycling and the sale of merchants to consumers are not the same in terms of legal relationship, the second-hand recycling behavior of the platform, this process is a civil act, the buyer and seller establish a "civil contract", the second-hand product holder is the real seller, neither party belongs to the consumer, so it does not fall within the jurisdiction of the Consumer Rights Protection Law.
Yao Kefeng, director of Guobiao Law Firm, emphasized that the scope of consumer rights and interests protection mainly includes the right of consumers to enjoy personal and property safety not to be harmed when purchasing and using goods and receiving services. The merchant or platform recycles the second-hand mobile phone, and the user does not purchase the goods or receive the service, so the two parties are in a voluntary civil contractual relationship. Although the Consumer Rights Protection Law cannot regulate this behavior, the E-Commerce Law, the Civil Code and other laws can be adjusted, and the rights and interests of both buyers and sellers will be protected by law.
Wu Nan, who has been in the mobile phone industry for nearly 7 years, revealed to the "City Boundary" that the software such as Aisi Assistant and Hourglass that everyone is currently using is not absolutely authoritative.
"For example, when the assistant judges whether the iPhone has changed the screen, it mainly looks at the IC code. Wu Nan explained to the "City Boundary" that the core components of the iPhone - the battery, tail plug, screen, camera, etc., all have corresponding IC codes, "about 40 digits, equivalent to a key". But the problem is that the current scalpers can not only replace the parts of the mobile phone, but also install the original IC code back, and the software cannot recognize it at all.
02. Where does the chaos come from?
In order to answer this question, the "City Boundary" has conducted various visits. In Wu Nan's view, the reason why the industry is chaotic is because it is profitable on the one hand, and because the concentration of the industry is still relatively low and it is still in the "reckless" stage.
"At present, the recycling volume of second-hand mobile phones in China is about 4.8%, which is far worse than the level of 35% in Europe and the United States, Japan and South Korea and 40%. But it is this 4.8% of the market that has already fed dozens of companies, large and small, and one has been listed. Wu Nan told the "City Boundary".
Looking back at China's not long history of second-hand mobile phone transactions, "Huaqiangbei" is an unavoidable name. The most widely circulated saying is that "even if there is only one screw, you can assemble an Apple mobile phone in Huaqiangbei", and of course, there are countless stories of wealth that have been realized or destroyed during this period.
As the country's largest second-hand mobile phone trading market, Huaqiangbei is known for its mature industrial support. In the words of people in the industry, "those state-of-the-art capping, grinding, and refurbishment technologies are good news for people who want to repair broken mobile phones, but it can be a nightmare for people who want to buy used mobile phones."
"This industry, in essence, is knowledge payment, as long as there is information asymmetry, some people use poor information to make money, the difference is whether it looks good or not. Many practitioners have expressed this view on the "city boundary".
In fact, looking at today's second-hand mobile phone industry chain, there are not many links that really deal with consumers. Wu Nan told "City Boundary" that in all the shipping routes of second-hand mobile phones, the proportion of direct to C is less than 10%. The reason why there are constant complaints is because consumers are directly involved, and secondly, because businesses "do have more room for profit".
In response to the chaos in the industry, Li Huaqiang added another perspective to the "city boundary". "From a certain point of view, the second-hand mobile phone market is very similar to second-hand cars, and the market chaos is caused by consumers and sellers, of course, the root cause is poor information."
"Take a 2020 iPhone 12, for example. It stands to reason that the battery health of the mobile phone will not be too high after a few years of use, but some consumers want it to have a 'battery efficiency of more than 90'. Li Huaqiang said that some merchants also "took advantage of the trend", brushed the battery health, and turned their heads to sell at a high price.
In fact, after entering the era of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, with the emergence of platforms such as Zhuan Zhuan, Xianyu, and Aihuishu, information transparency has been gradually enhanced through Internet technology, and the chaos in some industries is gradually improving. Just like the emergence of online car-hailing, it has brought changes to the traditional taxi industry. It's just that the emergence of these giants has also increased the exposure of the industry, so that the market has an emotional outlet for the chaos of second-hand mobile phones for many years.
"In the past, this line was more chaotic, and there were more parallel imports, copycats, and refurbished machines. A practitioner admitted that at that time, everyone stepped on the pit, and they could only admit it, and it was difficult to find scalpers and backpackers to defend their rights, let alone hype it up as a hot spot on the whole network. But now the three platforms are considered large enterprises, and every move will be infinitely amplified, and everyone can directly put the board on the well-known enterprises.
Although Zhuan Zhuan and Ai Recycling are trying to formulate enterprise and industry standards in the process of development, because second-hand mobile phones are a non-standard product after all, they are inevitably out of shape in the process of implementation. In the opinion of many industry insiders, under the current level of technology, although many links of second-hand mobile phone recycling, especially functional testing, have been automated, but when it comes to details such as fineness and scratches, "human testing" is still irreplaceable.
Human testing leads to another problem – subjectivity. Just like in a football game, although there are standards, different referees do not judge the same behavior exactly the same, even if the same foul is committed in the same game, the referee and the linesman are likely to come to different conclusions. Back to second-hand e-commerce, although platforms such as Zhuan Zhuan have their own testing standards, the judgment of defects is inevitably subjective, and the result may be "100 quality inspectors inspect 100 results." ”
In general, whether it is the "Yin and Yang Report" incident encountered by the Turnaround, or the 0 yuan recovery of the Aifeng faction known as the "white prostitute", the enterprise must have such and such problems, but there is no lack of gimmick elements in the communication process, and a business model of buying low and selling high is mixed with the "difference" caused by the subjective difference of the inspectors, which is amplified at the level of public opinion, so that the outside world mistakenly believes that the enterprise is subjective and intentional.
03. There is a long way to go on the road to standardization
For an industry that mainly sells "non-standard products", it is not easy to achieve the standardization of the industry. In fact, before this, companies such as Zhuan Zhuan, Xianyu, and Aihuihui, which are the head of the industry, have launched many measures to try to solve the stubborn diseases of the industry.
In the sale process, the biggest difficulty in the industry is to solve the problem of trust, and the current chaos in the industry is mainly focused on the easy to buy refurbished and counterfeit machines. "In fact, what many customers lack is not the hundreds of dollars, but the peace of mind that they want to buy. Li Huaqiang said to the "city boundary".
In order to solve the trust problem behind it, taking Zhuan Zhuan and Aihuishou as examples, these two companies have launched a "one-year warranty" service, and consumers can guarantee second-hand mobile phones purchased within one year if they have quality problems. Zhuan Zhuan has also launched an "official verification" service, which can solve the trust problem in the transaction process to a large extent.
Like new e-commerce, most second-hand e-commerce also have a "seven-day no reason to return" service, and recently, Zhuan Zhuan has also extended this service from online to offline, which is the first time that the second-hand industry has launched this service offline. Previously, due to face-to-face transactions, general manufacturers would not easily push the no-reason return service.
"If you don't like it within seven days, you can return it at any time, and we will bear the discount loss caused in the middle. A clerk at a recycling store told City Boundary that unlike the price of new mobile phones, the price of second-hand mobile phones often changes from day to day, and this service means a large cost investment for manufacturers.
In view of the price reduction behavior in the recycling process, the current common practice in the industry is to separate the recycling and sales links as much as possible, and the commission of the recycling link is linked to the recycling price, and the higher the recycling price, the higher the clerk's commission, so that the clerk has no motivation to reduce the price. Taking Zhuan Zhuan as an example, each of its machines is not sold on the spot after recycling, but is first sent back to the headquarters, and then distributed to different channels such as stores and online after quality inspection.
At the national and societal levels, the standardization of second-hand mobile phone recycling is also being promoted. Previously, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued an announcement on the "Key Areas of the "Leader" in the Implementation of Enterprise Standards in 2023", which mentioned the field of "second-hand retail" in the consumer retail industry, which has become a positive signal to promote the standardization of the second-hand recycling industry at the national level.
In 2022, Shenzhen also publicly issued a notice to solicit opinions from the public on the local standards of the "Second-hand Mobile Phone Trading Specifications", focusing on promoting the standardization of the transaction process of the second-hand mobile phone industry.
For a "non-standard" industry, the process of standardization is indeed full of hardships, take this turn of yin and yang test report incident, a number of industry people believe that in fact, because the standard is set too fine, "they dug a pit for themselves".
It is understood that the quality inspection process includes 367 processes, involving 75 major items such as function, fineness, and whether there is water ingress, among which the scratches are divided into five levels: none, subtle, slight, obvious and serious. Industry insiders believe that if the division is too fine, it will be difficult to judge and easy to confuse when distinguishing different levels, resulting in greater errors. "If there were only three grades, the error would be much smaller. But if some standards are set too broadly, and the same grade fluctuates too much, some buyers will feel unfair. That's the dilemma. ”
But this does not mean that the industry should give up standardization, in the view of many second-hand mobile phone practitioners, the standardization and standardization of the entire second-hand mobile phone industry is imperative, especially for the refinement of quality inspection standards, to a large extent, it is also the basis for protecting the interests of consumers.
"There are scalpers in many industries who take advantage of loopholes, and their products enter the market to damage everyone's interests in the end, and only by getting stricter and stricter standards can these people be driven out of the market. A second-hand mobile phone practitioner said frankly.
Liu Yuanju, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Finance and Law, believes that the circulation of second-hand products is good for the economy and environmental protection. Just like the emergence of online car-hailing, there are problems of one kind or another, but no one wants to go back to the era when there were only taxis. Everything has to be weighed between security and freedom, between market defects and market prosperity. There is no perfect regulation to eliminate all the drawbacks, and then the whole market will not be there.
(Chang Wei, Li Huaqiang, and Wu Nan pseudonyms in the article)
（作者 | 李丹 曾广，编辑 | 陈芳）