As one of the largest online marketplaces in the Nordics, CDON handles products from more than 1,500 retailers across Europe.
With that scale comes a major operational challenge:
returns are complex, cross-border, and expensive — and open-box products often lose value instead of being resold.
CDON needed a partner who could modernize the entire process and activate recommerce as a scalable category on their marketplace.
They chose Renow.
Prefer a quick overview? Watch the short case study video below.
The Challenge: Cross-Border Returns That Were Slow, Costly, and Hard to Scale
With customers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland — and merchants across Europe — CDON’s return flows were:
- Slow and manual, especially for open-box products
- Expensive because returns often had to be shipped back to the merchant’s home country
- Difficult to scale, leading to customer friction and merchant frustration
- Wasteful, with products losing value or sitting in storage
CDON wanted to simplify the process for customers, reduce logistics costs for merchants, and build a fully-fledged recommerce channel — something no Nordic marketplace had yet achieved.
The Solution: AI Inspection + Seamless Recommerce Flow
Renow delivered a tailored solution built specifically for large, multi-merchant marketplaces:
- Local Nordic return centres, reducing cross-border shipping
- AI-powered inspection and grading, ensuring transparency and consistent quality
- A dedicated recommerce category inside the CDON marketplace, where graded products are relisted for sale
- Full integration into customer service workflows, streamlining communication
- Fast resale with buyer protection, turning returns into high-trust circular purchases
Returned products can now be inspected, graded, cleaned, and listed directly on CDON — cutting transport, costs, and delays.
The Impact: Faster Returns, Lower Costs, Happier Merchants — and a Circular Future
Since partnering with Renow, CDON has:
- Significantly reduced the cost and time required to process returns
- Enabled local resale, avoiding return-to-origin shipping
- Improved the experience for both customers and merchants
- Built a scalable recommerce category inside their marketplace
- Extended the lifecycle of products and reduced unnecessary waste
- Strengthened their position as a sustainability-driven e-commerce leader
The partnership sets a new standard for Nordic marketplaces — and supports upcoming EU sustainability regulations through transparent, circular commerce.
What CDON Says
“Recommerce is a natural next step for CDON and for e-commerce at large. It’s about reducing waste, helping our merchants cut costs, and giving customers more affordable and sustainable choices. Renow brings the technology, infrastructure, and mindset needed to make this happen.”
— Kattis Åström, CCO, CDON
What This Means for the Nordics
Renow and CDON are proving that recommerce doesn’t have to be an add-on or a standalone operation.
It can be built into the marketplace itself, seamlessly powering supply, improving margins, and enabling circular consumption at scale.
The model is now ready to expand across the region — helping merchants, marketplaces, and customers participate in a smarter, more sustainable way of shopping.
Are you interested in optimizing your own returns process? Let’s talk and explore how Renow can help you accelerate resale and boost your circular economy. Book a call here.
About Renow
Renow is an AI-based recommerce startup that has created a unique way to build marketplace supply. Renow disrupts the supply chain through virtual warehouses and a grading engine offered with a freemium model for retailers and 3PLs. For consumers, Renow offers high-quality 2nd-cycle products from top brands at discounted prices. Renow’s vision is to make recommerce mainstream and decrease waste.
