musicMagpie on eBay: the same refurbished stock, 30 days' returns, and is it cheaper than musicMagpie's own site?

Search "musicmagpie ebay" and you get two kinds of result: eBay's own store page, and people asking whether the musicMagpie on eBay is the real one. It is. musicMagpie has sold on eBay under its own name since 2011, and its listings are the refurbished eBay row on a growing number of our product pages. On 02/11/2026 we read the store's About and Feedback tabs, the listings and listing descriptions for each of its three grades, eBay's Money Back Guarantee page, and its prices on seven products we compare, then set them against our rows for the same products the same day. musicmagpie.co.uk itself showed a Cloudflare security check in our browser all evening, so the site's own prices below are our reads of its pages, each with its time.

What is musicMagpie Shop on eBay?

It is musicMagpie selling as itself. The store's About tab names the business as Entertainment Magpie Ltd, company number 06277562, at 5a The Parklands, Lostock, Bolton BL6 4SD, with a musicmagpie.co.uk contact address, and gives the seller's eBay username as musicmagpie. eBay marks the store "Direct from brand", and the listing we opened carried "Direct from musicMagpie, item sold directly by the brand". On 02/11/2026 it had been a member since 2 February 2011, with 99.1% positive feedback, 51.7 million items sold, 497,000 followers and 712,660 items listed, most of them CDs, DVDs, games and books. Its Feedback tab showed 2,143,433 positive, 13,383 neutral and 8,493 negative ratings in the last twelve months, and detailed ratings of 4.9 for accurate description, 5.0 for postage cost, 4.9 for delivery time and 5.0 for communication.

The Bolton address is the point. musicMagpie buys phones from the public through trade-in, tests and refurbishes them in its own workshop and sells them itself, as is musicMagpie any good? explains. The eBay shop is the same company selling the same stock through a second shop window. It is not a reseller trading on the name, and the username is the one to check, because other business sellers list the same phones in the same eBay grades.

What does it sell, and what do its grades mean?

Phones, tablets, watches, headphones, laptops and consoles, all refurbished, with the entertainment media that gives the company its name. On 02/11/2026 its phone shelf ran from the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 17 and the iPhone Air, Galaxy phones from the S23 Ultra to the S26 Ultra and the Z Flip8, and Pixels from the 9 Pro XL to the 11 Pro XL, alongside Apple Watches from the Ultra to the Ultra 4, Galaxy Watches and AirPods Max 2. Its console shelf, read at 19:08, held the launch PlayStation 5 models with 825GB drives (Digital Edition £582.99 in Very Good, disc edition £635.99 in Very Good and £662.49 in Excellent), an Xbox Series S 512GB at £423.99 in Excellent, and Nintendo Switch models of 2019 and the OLED from £259.69; it had no Switch 2, no PS5 Slim or Pro and no Xbox Series X that evening, and the Digital Edition's listing page answered eBay's error page when we opened it.

The condition on each listing is one of eBay's three refurbished labels, and musicMagpie's own words sit in the title and the description. These are its definitions, read on 02/11/2026 on three iPhone 16 Pro listings:

• Good, shown as "Good - Refurbished": good cosmetic condition with signs of wear that may include scratches, visible scuffs and screen discolouration, nothing that impairs how it works, and battery health of at least 80%.
• Very Good, shown as "Very Good - Refurbished": very good cosmetic condition with light scratches or scuffs, and battery health of at least 80%.
• Excellent, shown as "Excellent - Refurbished": excellent cosmetic condition, with battery health of at least 85%.

These are the three grades musicMagpie sells on its own site, where the top one is called Pristine; on eBay it takes eBay's word, Excellent. Every description adds the same four lines: the phone has been fully tested and restored to factory settings, it does not come in its original box, it comes with a USB charging cable, free Royal Mail 48 delivery and a free 12-month warranty, and parts such as the battery, screen or camera may have been replaced "in house by qualified technicians". On our pages a listing in any of the three grades appears in the refurbished section. For what the words mean across shops, see refurbished phone grades explained, and for the eBay Refurbished badge, the iPhone 16 Pro listing we opened carried it, with eBay's line "one-year guarantee included, provided by the seller, UK only".

What about returns and warranty?

This is where the eBay shop differs from the site. The listing we opened on 02/11/2026 read "30 days return. Seller pays for return postage.", and all nine musicMagpie rows on our product pages that day had recorded the same 30 days. On musicmagpie.co.uk the money-back guarantee gives 14 days, as our musicMagpie guide sets out from its help centre. The warranty is the same 12 months either way, and it is musicMagpie's own in both places: eBay's refurbished programme says the guarantee is provided by the seller.

On top of that sits eBay's Money Back Guarantee, whose policy page, read on 02/11/2026, covers anything bought on eBay.co.uk and paid at eBay's checkout for 30 days from the estimated or actual delivery date: a full refund including postage if the item does not arrive, and a return for a full refund if it arrives faulty, damaged or not as described. It is "not a product warranty", and you lose it if you ask your card provider to settle the same purchase instead. The table in is it safe to buy tech on eBay? has the full terms. Your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 apply on top, as with any UK business seller.

Is musicMagpie on eBay cheaper than musicMagpie's site?

Where both priced the same phone, the two were within a few pounds of each other, in both directions. The bigger differences we found were inside the eBay shop itself, between its grades and its colours, and between musicMagpie and the other shops on the same page.

musicMagpie on eBay's prices are the listed prices read on its store search results and listings between 18:59 and 19:02 UK time on 02/11/2026, before eBay's coupon that evening (20% off, capped at £75, shown on many of its listings as a second price). musicmagpie.co.uk's prices are our own reads of its pages at the times given, because the site showed a Cloudflare check in our browser that evening; where a row was read on an earlier day the row says so. The other shops' prices are the rows on our product pages at the times given. Every musicMagpie on eBay listing carried free delivery.

Three things stand out. First, the gap between eBay and the site is small where both were read the same day: £6.20 one way on the iPhone 16 Pro, £2 the other way on the iPhone Air. Our iPhone 16e site row was a day old and £56 above eBay, so read the site on the day before taking that one at face value. Second, the gap between grades is not small: on the iPhone 16 Pro the step from Good to Very Good was £51.50 and from Very Good to Excellent £72.10, and on the Pixel 10 Pro XL a Good phone in another colour was £52 under the Very Good Moonstone on our page. Third, refurbished is not always the cheaper buy: on 02/11/2026 a Very Good Galaxy S26 Ultra from musicMagpie on eBay cost more than a new one from A1 Tech Deals on the same page, and musicMagpie's Very Good AirPods Max 2 cost £45.99 more than a new pair from another eBay business seller.

On that page the refurbished eBay row and the musicMagpie row are the same company twice, six pounds apart. Here is eBay against musicMagpie on the refurbished prices our pages hold for the products both sell, from our latest reads:

When is eBay the better buy, and when is the site?

eBay, when you want time to decide. The phone is the same, graded by the same people, with the same 12-month warranty, and the eBay listing gives you 30 days to send it back with the postage paid, against 14 on the site. eBay's Money Back Guarantee runs for the same 30 days from delivery, so a phone that arrives not as described has two routes back. On the evening we read, eBay also carried a 20% coupon capped at £75 on many of musicMagpie's listings, which the site's price did not match; the table quotes the listed prices, as our rows do, so check the listing for the coupon price on the day.

The site, when its price is lower that day. On the iPhone 16 Pro it was, by £6.20 at our last read, and on the iPhone 16e our day-old row was £56 above eBay, so the direction changes from phone to phone. The site also shows every colour and grade of a model on one page, where the eBay shop splits them across listings, some single-colour and some multi-colour, so the cheapest eBay colour takes a search. Whichever you choose, look at the grade before the price: Good means visible scratches and scuffs and a battery at 80% or more, and on both shop windows it is the cheapest rung by £50 or so.

Neither, sometimes. On two of our seven pages a new product from another shop undercut musicMagpie's refurbished one that day. New or refurbished: when is the saving worth it? sets out how big a gap a refurbished phone needs.

How to tell it is musicMagpie on our pages

Every eBay row on our product pages prints a line under the shop's name: who sells the listing and whether they take returns. On 02/11/2026 musicMagpie's rows read "Business seller · 99.1% · 30-day returns", and those two figures match the store's: 99.1% positive feedback, and 30 days' returns with the seller paying postage. The rows for Currys Clearance and Argos on eBay name the shop on that line; musicMagpie's row says business seller, with its feedback and returns, and the listing it opens names musicMagpie Shop above the price, with "Direct from musicMagpie" beside the condition.

Every eBay row on our pages is the cheapest fixed-price listing that passed our checks in its condition: no auctions, a seller with at least 50 ratings and 98% positive feedback, UK delivery, no damage, fault or lock words in the title, one model and one capacity per title, and a price in line with the other prices in that condition. The condition stays as the seller listed it: Good, Very Good and Excellent - Refurbished count as refurbished. We do not read the seller's name when we pick a row, which is why musicMagpie's listing is the eBay row on some of our pages and another business seller's on others. eBay pays us a commission through the eBay Partner Network when a purchase follows a click from our pages, as the affiliate disclosure says; musicmagpie.co.uk does not, and neither changes which listing we show or the order of the prices.

What to do

1. On our product page, look for the eBay row in the refurbished section whose line says "Business seller · 99.1% · 30-day returns", then check the listing names musicMagpie Shop. On eBay itself, the username to look for is musicmagpie, and the title ends in the grade.
2. Buy the grade, not the picture. Good means scratches, scuffs and possibly screen discolouration at 80% battery or more; Excellent means a clean phone at 85% or more. The warranty is the same 12 months on all three, and no grade comes with the original box.
3. Compare the three grades and the colours of one model before you buy: on 02/11/2026 the same iPhone 16 Pro in Good was £10.30 dearer in Black Titanium than in White, and a Pixel 10 Pro XL was £52 cheaper in Good, in another colour, than the Very Good on our page.
4. Compare with new on the same page. On two of our seven pages a new product from another shop was cheaper than musicMagpie's refurbished one that day.
5. Pay through eBay's checkout, keep the listing page, and test the screen and battery in the first 30 days while both the seller's returns and the Money Back Guarantee are open; the warranty does not cover screen damage after that.

For musicMagpie against the other refurbishers, see Back Market or musicMagpie, and for the shops that sell their own returns on eBay, Currys Clearance on eBay. Every refurbished product we compare, with today's prices, is on the refurbished hub.