Refurbisher CPU buyer for UK repair shops and refurb businesses.
For the chips that don't fit your build inventory — RMA pulls, leftover after the refurb sells, upgrade trade-ins, dead-board harvests. Trade-to-trade pricing, no eBay listing hassle, paid by Faster Payments after testing. Recurring postage runs welcome.
The leftover stream every refurb shop sits on
You probably already know the economics. You buy donor laptops or desktops, refurb the working ones, sell complete machines into the secondary market. Whatever's left — the CPU you swapped out, the RAM that was wrong-spec for the build, the drives from machines that ended up scrapped, the bits from RMA returns — accumulates in a drawer or a tray.
Listing those individually on eBay means photographing each chip, writing descriptions, fielding lowballers, eating the 13% fees, dealing with refunds. The maths only works if you're set up to do it at scale, and if you are, it's still a lot of hours per £100 recovered.
ChipFlip is the alternative for everything in that drawer. Send the lot — sorted or mixed, listed or unlabelled — and we'll quote, test, and pay per part. No listings, no photos, no eBay fees. The trade-off is you don't get retail prices; you get trade prices. But you also don't spend three hours processing what'll add up to £200.
What we buy from refurb businesses
RMA & upgrade pulls
The CPU you swapped out for a customer upgrade. The RAM that came back from an RMA but the customer wanted DDR5 instead. Steady drip from your normal repair flow — these stack up to real money over a quarter.
Post-refurb leftover stock
You bought 20 donor desktops, refurbed and sold 15. The 5 that weren't economic to refurb yielded working CPUs, RAM, drives. Send the parts — keep the cases for spares or scrap as normal.
Wrong-spec components
The 16GB DDR4 sticks you ended up with three of when the build only needed two. The 256GB SATA SSD when the customer asked for NVMe. Everything that doesn't fit your inventory plan moves through us instead of clogging a drawer.
Dead-board harvests
The motherboard's gone but the CPU and RAM are fine. Pull and send. We test on receipt and pay per Grade A; we'll attempt straightening on bent-pin units for free (about 70% recovery rate).
End-of-cycle inventory
Closing a product line? Migrating to AM5 builds and clearing AM4 stock? Send the inventory tail rather than depreciating it on the shelf for two more years.
Trade-to-trade economics
You already know the spread. To frame it specifically — for an i7-12700K in known-working condition:
- Retail eBay sale — roughly £155 listing price, minus £20 in fees and PayPal, minus 30 minutes per listing including photos and questions. Net £125 over ~45 minutes including dispatch.
- ChipFlip trade buyback — £65 paid by Faster Payments after testing, posted in a single batch with 20 other chips, ~2 minutes of admin per chip.
Per-chip the eBay route pays around £60 more, but costs you 30+ minutes per listing. That's roughly £55/hour effective rate via eBay vs near-zero admin time via ChipFlip. If your time has any other use, the ChipFlip path is the better trade — especially on the long tail of cheap chips where eBay listing time approaches the chip's value.
Where ChipFlip clearly wins: the i3s, the older i5s, the dead-board pulls, the off-spec RAM. These are the chips where listing time exceeds the recovery. We pay £6–£25 each on those, and you spend 30 seconds adding them to a batch.
Where eBay still wins: rare or high-end chips you've got time and inclination to list properly. We're the better channel for the bulk of your stream, not necessarily every single chip.
The trade-to-trade workflow
Build a quote or send a list
For sorted batches — use the live quote tool, lock in 30 seconds. For mixed lots — WhatsApp +44 7908 749694 with rough breakdown. Reply within working hours, quote fixed for 7 days (14 days on recurring sellers).
Pack with trade-grade discipline
You already know how to pack a CPU. Anti-static foam for high-value units, bubble wrap for the rest, jiffy bag bundles, padded box for the lot. Don't tape directly to the IHS — adhesive residue drops Grade A to Grade B (~10% off).
Post via your usual carrier
Royal Mail Tracked, DPD, Evri, ParcelForce — whoever you've got an account with. We email the address on quote lock. Insure for the full quote value. UK-only.
Per-line grading report
Typically 1–2 business days; faster on small batches, longer on 200+ component runs. Per-line: chip ID / grade / payable amount. Photo evidence on regrades. You're already used to this — it'll feel familiar.
Accept and get paid
Faster Payments after the grading report's accepted. Disputes? Return the whole batch at our cost under the ChipFlip Promise — no haggling, no friction.
Scale up to recurring
After 3 batches we move you onto standard payment terms — invoicing, scheduled receiving, reserved bench capacity, and a 5–15% volume uplift on Grade A as monthly throughput grows.
Worked example: monthly leftover stream from a small refurb shop
Realistic monthly accumulation for a UK refurb business doing ~50 desktop refurbs and ~30 RMA jobs:
- ~30 swapped-out CPUs from RMA + upgrade jobs (mixed gens) — Grade A average £18 → £540
- ~25 leftover CPUs from non-refurbed donors — Grade A average £22 → £550
- ~80 sticks of off-spec or leftover RAM — average £6 → £480
- ~20 SSDs / NVMe (256GB and 512GB mostly) — average £8 → £160
Total monthly Grade A: ~£1,730. Less typical 10% downgrade headroom, realistic net ≈ £1,550/month — about £21,000/year on what would otherwise be drawer fodder.
Time spent: ~45 minutes/month bagging, photographing, packing, posting. Compared to listing each chip individually on eBay (likely 8-10 hours of admin for the same recovery, with refund risk and storage cost on top) the ChipFlip path returns roughly 90% of the gross value at 5% of the time cost.
Recurring seller terms (after 3 successful batches)
Streamlined batches
Repeat sellers get familiar batch processing — same per-part rate each time, no extra paperwork.
Volume uplift on Grade A
Sliding scale. Indicative 5–15% over public list on Grade A units, depending on monthly volume and product mix. Custom rates on rare/high-value tiers.
Reserved bench slots
Booked dispatch dates with reserved test capacity. Means a 100-unit batch doesn't sit in queue waiting for a free grader.
14-day quote validity
Trade-account quotes lock for 14 days instead of 7 — gives you flexibility on dispatch timing if you're batching across multiple jobs.
Courier pickup option
For batches above ~30kg/month we arrange courier pickup at our cost. North West, M62 corridor, London routes well-established.
Direct-line quotes
For bulk batches we skip the normal queue — direct line for pricing on rare or high-value items. Useful for one-off i9 14th-gen or 128GB DDR5 batches you want priced fast.
Common questions from refurb shops
Or quote a one-off batch in 30 seconds
For a single batch you want to ship now, head to the live quote tool — tap + on each chip type, see the running total, lock when you're ready. Fixed 7-day quote and the postal address by email instantly.
Related pages: bulk & trade overview for the full standard payment terms, ITAD CPU buyback if you also handle corporate decommission, selling pulled CPUs for packing tips and ad-hoc flows, or scrap CPU buyer for the per-part-vs-per-kg argument framed for non-trade audiences. Got server-grade Xeon CPUs from data-centre or workstation pulls? Xeon flow — quoted on receipt.