Trade-in methods

Learn about the different ways you can enable your customers to trade-in their previously purchased items.

The Tern Trade-in app allows you to set up your trade-in programme to accept both products that have purchased online from your store, and those that have been bought elsewhere (for example, from a wholesale partner, from a secondhand marketplace like Ebay, or from a brick-and-mortar store).

In the settings of the app, you can enable or disable trade-in for both types of products.

The following section explains more about each trade-in method.

Overview of trade-in methods

Trade-in for products with online order history

This trade-in method enables your customers to trade-in items that they have previously purchased from your online store. By either logging into their store account, or looking up an individual order, customers can browse and select products from their order history that they want to trade-in.

The main benefit of this method is that you know what products have been traded-in and all of the data associated with them. For example, when they were bought, who purchased them, and all of the product details.

Adding a product from order history to a trade-in

Trade-in for products that require registration (also referred to as 'Product registration')

This trade-in method enables your customers to trade-in items that they could have purchased anywhere. As the merchant, you have full control over what product options customers can trade-in and can create different category structures to help your customers identify the product they want to trade-in.

As products traded-in through this method have no order history attached to them, we also enable you to ask the customer some brief questions about the products.

Adding a registered product to a trade-in

Which trade-in methods should you use?

When setting up your trade-in programme, one of the first decisions you will be faced with is what trade-in methods you should use. While this ultimately differs for each merchant, there are a couple of scenarios where we would recommend choosing a single trade-in method or a combination of the two.

When to enable both trade-in for products with online order history and products that require registration:

• If you have migrated to Shopify from another e-commerce platform and haven't imported your order history

• If you sell through wholesale partners, 3rd party channels, or if you have a brick-and-mortar store

• If you have dramatically altered your product listings for historical products

When to enable trade-in only for products that require registration:

• If you are a young brand/business and your order history is limited

• If you only want to accept other brands products

When to enable trade-in only for products with online order history:

• If you only want to take back items that have been purchased through your online store.