Responsible Shopping from Start to Finish
We work hard to ensure the products in your shopping cart are of high quality, safe, durable and responsibly manufactured. We know our products, and we want to provide comprehensive and transparent information about them. We also monitor and promote responsible working conditions and environmental practices. By doing so, we want to help our customers find the best long-lasting products for their specific needs.
Helping Customers to Find the Best Products for Their Needs
An important part of our environmental responsibility is providing high-quality, long-lasting products that meet our customers' needs. Our knowledgeable sales staff help you make lasting purchases, and we also extend the life of your products wherever possible by offering comprehensive after-sales services, including an extended three-year warranty on many electronic devices.
With thousands of products to choose from, being a consumer is not always easy. That is why we offer exceptionally comprehensive product information to support your purchasing decisions. For transparency, we also provide service and return rates for products, and our website contains hundreds of thousands of unique and uncensored product reviews to help you choose the product that is right for you. Making responsible choices easier, we have improved product information regarding energy consumption and power, and offer purchase guides for choosing energy-efficient products. We also develop products to extend their service life.
We value feedback from our customers, and while we have done well in customer satisfaction ratings, our aim is to further improve the customer experience. We are on the customer's side: we do not push – instead we tell about our products honestly and professionally. This also helps us minimize shopping errors — in fact, the return rate for the products we sell is only 0.7%. The return rate including service cases was 0.9%
Fair Working Conditions in the Supply Chain
We respect and promote internationally recognized human rights in our own operations and in our supply chain. Respect for human and labor rights is also key in our Code of Conduct.
The products we sell are manufactured all over the world — including countries where working conditions and human rights are not a matter of course. That is why we choose our suppliers carefully and expect our partners to adhere to our Code of Conduct.
Our business is guided in the big picture by international declarations, conventions and recommendations, such as the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Labour Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Own Brands under the Magnifying Glass
We work closely with our suppliers and pay particular attention to the sustainability issues of our own brands, such as human and labor rights, environmental work, governance, and procurement practices. Verkkokauppa.com's private label products include for example GZR-bikes, Ströme-small appliances and Anton Oliver-grills - at total of around 2100 different products. The products are manufactured by a little over 160 carefully selected contract manufacturers, who we work closely with to promote responsible working conditions and environmental practices.
In 2023, 66% of our own-brand products were made in China and Taiwan, and 17% in Turkey, both of which are risk countries in terms of human and labor rights. We require suppliers of our own brands in high-risk countries to provide evidence or agree to a third-party sustainability audit. We aim to have all our major own brand suppliers audited — in 2023 we reached 99.8%.
We Promote Product Longevity
Our customer service is easily accessible, and our after-sales service is constantly evolving to cover new products and improve the availability of spare parts. We refer our customers to either brand-specific or our own after-sales services when necessary, and we closely monitor our service and return records. We also encourage our customers to take care of their things: cleaning the vacuum cleaner, defrosting the freezer and keeping the antivirus software on their computer up to date to keep their products in good condition for as long as possible.
We pride ourselves on our knowledgeable buyers who follow trends and are passionate about their work. We make careful use of our service and returns data, using it in our purchasing department in making selection decisions. While we strive to identify the sustainability and safety of products at the point of purchase, we are not perfect. It is therefore extremely valuable that, based on the feedback and data we receive on our products, we are also able to weed out weaker products from our inventories, ensuring a range of high-quality products.
Our selection of used products already covers more than 100 products. The selection marketed as FWD covers used computers, tablets, phones, and laptop docks purchased from as near as possible from the markets of Finland and the Nordic countries. In addition to this, we are expanding the maintenance services offered for our own brands and products: the service process is now operational for bikes, phones, electric scooters and snow blowers. The maintenance process has also been piloted for televisions. The availability of spare parts is also being improved continuously.
In the spring of 2023, we launched a trade-in service "Vaihtokauppa" that promotes circular economy, allowing customers to sell their functional used electronic devices back and receiving credit corresponding to the value of the device to their customer account. The service currently covers smartphones, smartwatches, tablets and laptops.