Buying a refurbished product.

[humancacher]

Hello. I'm relatively new to guns, but this gun I am talking about is a pellet gun. I'm sorry if this is the wrong section to post this in but it didn't seem to fit any other category and this was the closest match.

There is this decent looking pellet gun out there called the Benjamin 392, .22 caliber. It's normal retail price is 150 dollars. However, if I buy the "refurbished" Benjamin 392 it only costs 100 dollars.

Should I go for this deal? What would the disadvantage of a refurbished product be? How would it be refurbished? Thank you so much for any help, I need to decide tomorrow to order for Christmas. Here are the links:

Stock/Normal - http://www.airgundepot.com/392.html
Refurbished - http://www.airgundepot.com/392-rm.html

God bless.

 

[Clipper]

...Somebody buys the gun, and find out it won't hold pressure. They return it, and the retailer sends it back. The manufacturer finds a blown or damaged or missing seal, fixes it, and since they can't legally call it 'new', they sell it at a discount to Sportsman's Guide as a 'refurbished' piece, with a new-gun warranty...

 

[2RCO]

I generally will buy a refurbished product only if it still has a warranty. If not I try to avoid it.

 

[Mojo-jo-jo]

I have purchased a number of refurbished products, mostly power tools (not guns).

There is an "up side" to refurbished items--they have been carefully inspected and repaired to generally "like new" condition. When you purchase a new item, it has likely simply been briefly function tested as a quality control test. In contrast, a refurbished item has been carefully inspected and evaluated, any problems fixed, and then fully tested before being "re-certified."

Refurbished items can be a great value.

 

[rcmodel]

On the other hand, if a retailer has a large enough quanity of a refurbished item to put it in a catalog?

There must have been a heck of a lot of new ones that didn't work or broke early on for some reason.

The last refurbished item I will ever own was a Nokia cell phone I got from AT&T as a free up-grade.

It still didn't work right after refurbishing, and was totally undependable from day one.
Never again!

rc

 

[ArmedBear]

It depends on what it is.

Sometimes, you can ascertain what's been fixed.

In some cases, it means that a real human has checked over and tested the device in a way that it wouldn't have been, otherwise.

 

[mercdeking]

Funny thing sometimes refurbished items are brand new or used once that people didn't want and lied about an issue. Hence, it gets returned. I bought a dryer that after it got sent out to mr. appliances it came back where they listed that nothing was wrong and that all the cycles worked (the returnee said that it was not drying clothes).

When I looked into the lint trap there was nothing in there. Cheapest dryer I ever bought and still going strong since 2005 (498.00 paid 150 bucks).

I peruse the returned items after they get returned from repair for indicators like that. But yeah, make sure it has at least a warranty or a return period. As is, is not a good reliability indicator.

 

[navyretired 1]

Often refurbs are new items which failed inspection and was put through an expert technician's hands for repair. It has same warrantee but is assembled by an expert instead of minimum wage line assembly.
I know this happens with scopes and it makes more sense than scrapping.