Condition grading: normalizing the least standard field
Condition is the field with the highest price impact and the lowest standardization. 'Excellent' is a claim, not a measurement, and it means different things on every platform.
- 6
- up to 45%
- Stratified
sealed, open box, excellent, good, fair, for parts
spread between sealed and fair on the same variant
grades never pooled into one median
One ladder, mapped from many vocabularies
Every source's condition vocabulary is mapped onto a single six-step ladder: new sealed, open box, used excellent, used good, used fair, and for parts. Mappings are explicit and inspectable, not inferred per listing at read time.
Where a source's grade is genuinely ambiguous — the common 'pre-owned' catch-all — the listing is assigned the conservative grade and flagged, rather than being optimistically promoted.
Description text is a downgrade signal only
Seller descriptions can move a grade down but never up. Disclosed screen scratches, missing accessories, battery health below threshold and repair history all pull the assigned grade toward the conservative end. A glowing adjective in the title changes nothing.
Grades are never pooled
Medians are computed within grade. Pooling a sealed unit with a used-fair unit produces a central estimate that describes no purchasable item and flatters low-grade inventory while penalizing high-grade inventory.
When a grade has too few comps for its own median, MarginMap says so rather than borrowing the adjacent grade's number.
Grade uncertainty is a reseller risk line
Buying at a claimed grade you cannot verify before purchase is a real, quantifiable risk. The evaluator carries grade uncertainty into the sale-side price assumption, so a deal that only works if the item arrives one grade better than described is visibly marked as such.
Frequently asked
Keep reading
Run one product through it
Open the workspace, search in plain language, and open the evidence drawer on the first number you doubt.