FlippoWhat item condition actually means
Condition is the second thing a buyer looks at and the field sellers are laziest about. It decides the price, it decides the returns, and if you record it as free text it will quietly break your own inventory.
The grades, and what a buyer reads into them
| Grade | What it promises |
|---|---|
| New | Unused, as it left the factory. Sealed, or with tags. If you opened it to check, it is not this. |
| Like New | Used, but nobody could tell. No marks, complete, box present if it had one. |
| Very Good | Light wear you have to look for. Works perfectly. The honest grade for most carefully-used things. |
| Good | Visible wear, nothing that affects use. Where most secondhand items genuinely sit. |
| Fair | Obvious wear, or something missing. Works, but the buyer should see photos of the flaws. |
| Poor | Heavy wear or a real fault. Sold cheap and described honestly. |
| Broken | Does not work. For parts or repair, and it must say so. |
Grade down, not up
The gap between Very Good and Good is where most returns are born. A seller looks at an item they have owned and known for a month and sees Very Good; a buyer opening a parcel with fresh eyes sees Good and feels misled.
The cost is asymmetric. Grading one step low costs you a little on the price. Grading one step high costs you the return postage, the refund, the relisting, and a review that follows you around. When you are genuinely unsure between two grades, take the lower one and photograph the reason.
Why free text ruins it
Left to themselves, sellers write "mint", "vgc", "used - good", "Broken/Needs Repairs", "like new!!", and a dozen other variants for the same seven states. Then they filter inventory by condition and the item does not appear, because the filter matches exact text and nothing matched.
It gets worse with anything automated. Naive matching on a phrase like "Broken/Needs Repairs" can find the letters of "new" inside "Needs" and grade a broken item as New. That is not hypothetical - it is a real failure mode of substring matching, and it prices a dead console like a working one.
Pick a fixed set of grades, use only those, and map everything else onto them at the point it arrives - AI output, a CSV import, an old listing. A condition your filters cannot see is the same as no condition at all.
Write the flaw, not just the grade
The grade sets expectations; the note prevents arguments. "Good - small scratch on the back, not visible when the case is on" sells better than "Good", because the buyer stops wondering what you are not saying.
One caveat if you hold several of the same item: a note like "cracked hinge" is true of one unit and false of the other four. Per-unit notes belong to the unit, not to the product, and they must not be copied when you duplicate an item.
Flippo grades on a fixed scale
Seven grades, colour coded, filterable. Anything the AI or an import produces is mapped onto them, so nothing goes missing because it was worded differently.